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The Torch 



The Torch 

EIGHT LECTURES ON RACE POWER 

IN LITERATURE DELIVERED BEFORE 

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE OF 

BOSTON MCMIII 




GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 



AUGKSCUNT ALIAE GENTES, AI.IAE MINCUNTUR, 
INdUE BREVI SPATIO MUTANTUR SAECLA ANIMANTUM 
ET QUASI CUESORES TITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT 



NEW YORK 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 

MCMV 






I Two Oopies tiamv^ 

OCT i imb 



Copyright, 1905, by 
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 
Published, October, 1905 N 




# 



*::: contents 

::j^ PAGE 

^ Man and the Race 3 

The Language of all the World , ... 33 

The Titan Myth (I) 57 

The Titan Myth (II) .81 

Spenser 113 

Milton 139 

Wordsworth 165 

Shelley 193 



The Torch 



MAN AND THE RACE 



It belongs to a highly developed race to become, in a 
true sense, aristocratic — a treasury of its best in practi- 
cal and spiritual types, and then to disappear in the sur- 
rounding tides of men. So Athens dissolved Uke a pearl 
in the cup of the Mediterranean, and Rome in the cup 
of Europe, and Judaea in the cup of the Universal Com- 
munion. Though death is the law of all life, man touches 
this earthen fact with the wand of the spirit, and trans- 
forms it into the law of sacrifice. Man has won no vic- 
tory over his environment so subhme as this, finding in 
his mortal sentence the true choice of the soul and in the 
road out of Paradise the open highway of eternal Ufe. 
Races die ; but the ideal of sacrifice as the highest race- 
destiny has seldom occurred to men, though it has been 
suggested both by devout Jews and by devout Irishmen 
as the divinely appointed organic law of the Hebrew 
and the Celt. In the general view of men the extinction 

[3] 



THE TORCH 

of a race partakes of the unreasoning finality of 
nature. 

The vital flow of hfe has this in common with disease 
— that it is self-hmited ; the fever runs its course, and 
bums away. "All thoughts, all passions, all dehghts," 
have this history. In the large arcs of social being, move- 
ments of the human spirit, however embracing and pro- 
found, obey the same law of the hmitation of specific 
energy. Revolutions, reforms, re-births exhaust their 
fuel, and go out. Races are only greater units of man; 
for a race, as for an individual, there is a time to die ; and 
that time, as history discloses it, is the moment of per- 
fection. This is the largest fact in the moral order of the 
world; it is the centre of providence in history. In the hfe 
of the human spirit the death of the best of its achieving 
elements, in the moment of their consummation, is as 
the fading of the flower of the field or the annual fall of 
the leaves of the forest in the natural world ; and unless 
this be a sacrificial death, it were wantonness and waste 
like the deaths of nature ; but man and his works are su- 
pernatural, and raised above nature by an imperishable 
relation which they contain. Race-history is a perpetual 
celebration of the Mass. The Cross initials every page 
with its broad gold, and he whose eye misses that letter 
has lost the clue to the meaning. I do not refer to the self- 
devotion of individuals, the sacred fives of the race. I 

[4] 



MAN AND THE RACE 
speak of the involuntary element in the life of nations, or 
what seems such on the vast scale of social Ufe. Always 
some great culture is dying to enrich the soil of new har- 
vests, some civilization is crumbling to rubbish to be the 
hill of a more beautiful city, some race is spending itself 
that a lower and barbarous world may inherit its stored 
treasure-house. Although no race may consciously de- 
vote itself to the higher ends of mankind, it is the pre- 
rogative of its men of genius so to devote it; nor is any 
nation truly great which is not so dedicated by its war- 
riors and statesmen, its saints and heroes, its thinkers 
and dreamers. A nation's poets are its true owners; and 
by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its 
real possessions to strangers and aliens. 

This dedication of the energy of a race by its men of 
genius to the higher ends of mankind is the sap of all the 
world. The spiritual life of mankind spreads, the spir- 
itual unity of mankind grows, by this age-long surrender 
of privilege and power into the hands of the world's new 
men, and the leavening of the mass by the best that has 
anywhere arisen in it, which is thus brought about. The 
absorption of aristocracies in democracies, the dissolu- 
tion of the nobler product in inferior environments, the 
salutary death of cultures, civilizations, breeds of men, 
is the strict line on which history, drawing the sundered 
parts of the earth slowly together, moves to that great 

[5] 



THE TORCH / 

consummation when the best that has at any time been 
in the world shall be the portion of every man born into 
it. If the old English blood, which here on this soil gave 
birth to a nation, spread civilization through it, and cast 
the orbit of its starry course in time, is destined to be 
thus absorbed and lost in the nation which it has formed, 
we should be proud and happy in such a fate; for this is 
to wear the seal of God's election in history. Nay, if the 
aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a 
world of the coloured races of the earth, I for one should 
only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial 
idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of 
mankind. 

Unless this principle is strongly grasped, unless there 
be an imperishable relation in man and his works which 
they contain, and which, though it has other phases, here 
appears in this eternal salvage stored up in a slowly per- 
fecting race, history through its length and breadth is a 
spectacle to appall and terrify the reason. The perpetual 
flux of time — 

*' Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes 
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance " — 

is a mere catastrophe of blood and error unless its 
mighty subverting and dismaying changes are related to 
something which does not pass away with dethroned 

[6] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

gods, abandoned empires and repealed codes of law and 
morals. But in the extinction of religions, in imperial rev- 
olutions, in the bloody conflict of ideas, there is one 
thing found stable ; it is the mind itself, growing through 
ages. That which in its continuity we call the human 
spirit, abides. Men, tribes, states disappear, but the 
race-mind endures. A conception of the world and an 
emotional response thereto constitute the life of the race- 
mind, and fill its consciousness with ideas and feelings, 
but in these there is no element of chance, contingency 
or frailty; they are master-ideas, master-emotions, 
clothed with the power of a long reign over men, and im- 
posing themselves upon each new generation almost 
with the yoke of necessity. What I designate as the race- 
mind — the sole thing permanent in history — is this 
potentiality of thought and feeling, in any age, realizing 
itself in states of mind and habits of action long estab- 
lished in the race, deeply inherited, and slowly modified. 
The race-mind is the epitome of the past. It contains all 
human energy, knowledge, experience, that survives. It 
is the resultant of millions of lives whose earthly power 
it stores in one deathless force. 

This race-mind is simply formed. Life presents cer- 
tain permanent aspects in the environment, which gen- 
erates way of behaviour thereto, normal and general 
among men. The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-field, 

[7] 



THE TORCH 

a battle-ground ; and thence arises through human con- 
tact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of tillage, 
or agriculture, ways of fighting, or mihtary tactics and 
strategy, and these are incorporated in individuals as 
habits of life. The craftsman has the mind of his craft. 
Life also presents certain other permanent internal apti- 
tudes in the soul, whence arisest the mind of the artist, 
the inventor, the poet. But this cast of mind of the math- 
ematician or of the painter is rather a phase of individual 
life. In the larger unit of the race, environment and apti- 
tude working together in the historic fife of ages develop 
ideas, moods and energies characteristic of the race in 
which they occur. In the sphere of ideas, freedom is in- 
dissolubly linked with the English, righteousness with 
the Hebrew; in the temperamental sphere, a signal in- 
stance is the Celtic genius — mystery, twilight, super- 
natural fantasy, lamentation, tragic disaster — or the 
Greek genius, definiteness, proportioned beauty, or- 
dered science, philosophic principle; and, in the sphere 
of energy, land and gold hunger, and that strange soul- 
hunger — hunger to possess the souls of men — which 
is at the root of all propagandism, have been motive 
powers in many races. 

Thus, in one part or another of time and place, and 
from causes within and without, the race, coming to its 
best, flowers in some creative hope, ripens in some shap- 

[8] 



MAN AND THE RACE 
ing thought, glows in some resistless enthusiasm. Each 
of these in its own time holds an age in its grasp. They 
seize on men and shape them in multitudes to their will, 
as the wind drives the locusts ; make men hideous ascet- 
ics, send them on forlorn voyages, devote them to the 
block and the stake, make Argonauts, Crusaders, Lol- 
lards of them, fill Europe in one age with a riot of revo- 
lution and in the next with the camps of tyrannic power. 
These ideas, moods, energies have mysterious potency; 
they seem to possess an independent being ; though, like 
all the phenomena of Hfe-energy they are self-limited, 
the period of their growth, culmination and decline ex- 
tends through generations and centuries ; they seem less 
the brood of man's mind than higher powers that feed on 
men. They are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses — 
fanatics, martyrs, dupes; they doom whole peoples to 
glory or shame; in the undying battle of the soul they 
are the choosers of the slain. Though they proceed from 
the human spirit, they rule it; and in hfe they are the 
spiritual presences which are most closely unveiled to 
the apprehension, devotion and love of men. 

The race-mind building itself from immemorial time 
out of this mystery of thought and passion, as genera- 
tion after generation kneels and fights and fades, takes 
unerringly the best that anywhere comes to be in the 
world, holds to it with the cHng of fate, and lets all else 

[9] 



THE TORCH 

fall to oblivion; out of this best it has made, and still 
fashions, that enduring world of idea and emotion into 
which we are born as truly as into the natural world. It 
has a marvellous economy. 

*'One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world has never lost.^* 

Egypt, India, Greece and Rome, Italy, the English, 
France, America, the Turk, the Persian, the Russian, 
the Japanese, the Chinese, the Negro feed its pure tra- 
dition of what excellence is possible to the race-mind, 
and has grown habitual in its being; and, as in the old 
myth, it destroys its parent, abolishing all these differ- 
ences of chmate, epoch and skull. The race-mind unifies 
the race which it preserves ; that is its irresistible line of 
advance. It wipes out the barriers of time, language and 
country. It undoes the mischief of Babel, and restores 
to mankind one tongue in which all things can be under- 
stood by all men. It fuses the Bibles of all nations in one 
wisdom and one practice. It knocks off the tribal fetters 
of caste and creed; and, substituting thought for blood 
as the bond of the world, it slowly liberates that free 
soul, which is one in all men and common to all man- 
kind. To free the soul in the individual Hfe, and to ac- 
complish the unity of mankind — that is its work. 
To share in this work is the peculiar and characteris- 

[10] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

tic office of literature. This fusion of the nations of the 
earth, this substitution of the thought-tie for the blood- 
tie, this enfranchisement of the soul, is its chief func- 
tion; for hterature is the organ of the race-mind. That 
is why Uterature is immortal. Though man's inheritance 
is bequeathed in many ways — the size and shape of the 
skull, the physical predisposition of the body, oral tradi- 
tion, monumental and artistic works, institutions — civ- 
ihzation ever depends in an increasing degree upon litera- 
ture both for expression and tradition; and whatever 
other forms the race-mind may mould itself into, htera- 
ture is its most universal and comprehensive form. That 
is why Uterature is the great conservator of society. It 
shares in the Uf e of the race-mind, partakes of its nature, 
as language does of thought, corresponds to it accurate- 
ly, dupKcates it, is its other-self. It is through Uterature 
mainly that we know the race-mind, and come to pos- 
sess it ; for though the term may seem abstract, the thing 
is real. Men of genius are great in proportion as they 
share in it, and national Uteratures are great in propor- 
tion as they embody and express it. Bruntiere, the pres- 
ent critic of France, has recently announced a new Uter- 
ary formula. He declares that there is a European 
Uterature, not the combined group of national Utera- 
tures, but a single literature common to European civil- 
ization, and that national literatures in their periods of 

[11] 



THE TORCH 

culmination, are great in proportion as they coincide for 
the time being with this common Hterature, feed it, and, 
one after another taking the lead, create it. The declara- 
tion is a gleam of self -consciousness in the unity of Eu- 
rope. How slowly the parts of a nation recognize the 
integrity of their territory and the community of their in- 
terests is one of the constant lessons of history; the 
Greek confederation, the work of Alfred or of Bis- 
marck, our own experience in the Revolutionary period 
illustrate it; so the unity of Europe is still half -obscure 
and dark, though Catholicism, the Renaissance, the Re- 
formation, the Revolution in turn flashed this unity 
forth, struggling to realize itself in the common civiliza- 
tion. The literature of Europe is the expression of this 
common genius — the best that man has dreamed or 
thought or done, has found or been, in Europe — now 
more brilliant in one capital, now in another as the life 
ebbs from state to state, and is renewed; for, though it 
fail here or there, it never ceases. This is the burning of 
the race-mind, now bright along the Seine, the Rhine 
and the Thames, as once by the Ganges and the Tiber. 
The true unity of literature, however, does not lie in the 
literature of Europe or of India or of antiquity, or in any 
one manifestation, but in that world-literature which is 
the organ of the race-mind in its entire breadth and 
wholeness. The new French formula is a brilliant appli- 

[12] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

cation, novel, striking and arresting, of the old and fa- 
miliar idea that civilization in its evolution in history is a 
single process, continuous, advancing and integral, of 
which nations and ages are only the successive phases. 
The life of the spirit in mankind is one and universal, 
burns with the same fires, moves to the same issues, 
joins in a single history ; it is the race-mind realizing it- 
self cumulatively in time, and mainly through the inher- 
iting power of great literature. 

I have developed this conception of the race-mind at 
some length because it is a primary idea. The nature of 
literature, and the perspective and interaction of partic- 
ular literatures, are best comprehended in its light. I em- 
phasize it. The world-literature, national literatures, 
individual men of genius, are what they are by virtue of 
sharing in the race-mind, appropriating it and identify- 
ing themselves with it; and what is true of them, on the 
great scale and in a high degree, is true also of every 
man who is born into the world. A man is a man by par- 
ticipating in the race-mind. Education is merely the pro- 
cess by which he enters it, avails himself of it, absorbs it. 
In the things of material civilization this is plain. All the 
callings of men, arts, crafts, trades, sciences, professions, 
the entire round of practical life, have a body of knowl- 
edge and method of work which are like gospel and 
ritual to them; apprentice, journeyman and master are 

[13] 



THE TORCH 

the stages of their career; and if anjrthing be added, 
from life to life, it is on a basis of ascertained fact, of or- 
thodox doctrine and fixed practice. I suppose technical 
education is most uniform, and by definiteness of aim 
and economy of method is most efficient ; and in the pro- 
fessions as well as in the arts and crafts competition 
places so high a premium on knowledge and skill that 
the mastery of all the past can teach is compulsory in a 
high degree. Similarly, in society, the material unities 
such as those which commerce, manufacturing, bank- 
ing estabhsh and spread, are soonest evident and most 
readily accepted; so true is this that the peace of the 
world is rather a matter of finance than of Christianity. 
These practical activities and the interests that spring 
out of them He in the sphere of material civiHzation ; but 
the race-mind, positive, enduring and beneficent as it is 
in that sphere, is there parcelled out and individuahzed, 
and gives a particular and almost private character to 
man and classes of men, and it seeks a material good. 
There is another and spiritual sphere in which the soul 
which is one and the same in all men comes to self- 
knowledge, has its training, and achieves its mastery of 
the world. Essential, universal manhood is found only 
here; for it is here that the race-mind, by participation in 
which a man is a man, enfranchizes the soul and gives to 
it the citizenship of the world. Education in the things of 

[14] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

the spirit is often vague in aim and may seem wasteful in 
method, and it is not supported by the thrust and impet- 
us of physical need and worldly hope ; but it exists in all 
men in some measure, for no one born in our civilization 
is left so savage, no savage born in the wild is left so 
primitive but that he holds a mental attitude, however 
obscure, toward nature, man and God, and has some 
disciphne, however initial, in beauty, love and religion. 
These things lie in the sphere of the soul. It is, neverthe- 
less, true that the greatest inequahties of condition exist 
here, and not in that part of life where good is measured 
by the things of fortune. The difference between the out- 
cast and the millionaire is as nothing to that between the 
saint and the criminal, the fool and the knower, the boor 
and the poet. It is a blessing in our civiKzation, and one 
worthy of the hand of Providence, that if in material 
things justice be a laggard and disparities of condition 
be hard to remedy, the roads to church and school are 
public highways, free to all. This charter of free educa- 
tion in the life of the soul, which is the supreme oppor- 
tunity of an American life, is an open door to the treas- 
ury of man's spirit. There whosoever will shall open the 
book of all the world, and read and ponder, and shall 
enter the common mind of man which is there contained 
and avail of its wisdom and absorb its energies into his 
own and become one with it in insight, power and hope, 

[15] 



THE TORCH 

and ere he is aware shall find himself mingling with 
the wisest, the hoHest, the lovehest, as their comrade and 
peer. He shall have poet and sage to sup with him, and 
their meal shall be the bread of hfe. 

What, then, is the position of the youth — of any man 
whose infinite life Hes before him — at his entrance on 
this education, on this attempt to become one with the 
mind of the race ? and, to neglect the material side of hfe, 
what is the process by which he begins to five in the 
spirit, and not as one new-born, but even in his youth 
sharing in the wisdom and disciplined power of a soul 
that has hved through all human ages — the soul of 
mankind? We forget the beginnings of Hfe; we forget 
first sensation, first action, and the unknown magic by 
which, as the nautilus builds its shell, we built out of 
these early elements this world of the impalpable blue 
walls, the ocean and prairie floors, and star-sown space, 
each one of us for ourselves. There is a thought, which I 
suppose is a commonplace and may be half -trivial, but 
it is one that took hold of me in boyhood with great te- 
nacity, and stirred the sense of strangeness and marvel in 
Hfe; the idea that all I knew or should ever know was 
through something that had touched my body. The 
ether-wave envelopes us as the ocean, and in that small 
surface of contact is the sphere of sensibiHty — of Hght, 
sound, and the rest — out of which arises the world 

[16] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

which each one of us perceives. It seems a fantastic con- 
ception, but it is a true one. For me the idea seemed 
to shrink the world to the dark envelope of my own 
body. It served, however, to initiate me in the broader 
conception that the soul is the centre, and that life — the 
world — radiates from it into the enclosing infinite. 
Wordsworth, you remember, in his famous image of our 
infancy presents the matter differently; for him the in- 
fant began with the infinite, and boy and man lived in an 
ever narrowing world, a contracting prison, like that 
fabled one of the Inquisition, and in the end life became 
a thing common and finite : 

^^ Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the 'prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing hoy. 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows. 
He sees it in his joy: 

At length the man perceives it die away. 
And jade into the light of common day" 

This was never my own conception, nor do I think it is 
natural to many men. On the contrary, fife is an expan- 
sion. The sense of the larger world comes first, perhaps, 
in those unremembered years when the sky ceases to be 
an inverted bowl, and lifts off from the earth. The ex- 
perience is fixed for me by another half -childish memory, 
the familiar verses of Tom Hood in which he de- 

[17] 



THE TORCH 

scribes his early home. You will recall the almost nur- 
sery rhymes: 

"7 remember y I remember 

The fir-trees dark and high; 
I used to think their slender tops 

Were close against the sky; 
It was a childish ignorance^ 

But now *t is little joy 
To know I 'm farther off from Heaven 

Than when I was a boy." 

Sentiment in the place of philosophy, the thought is the 
same as Wordsworth's, but the image is natural and 
true. The noblest image, however, that sets forth the 
spread of the world, is in that famous sonnet by an ob- 
scure poet, Blanco White, describing the first time that 
the sun went down in Paradise : 

" Mysterious night! when our first parent knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name. 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame. 

This glorious canopy of light and blue? 

Yet, ^neath the curtain of translucent dew. 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting fiame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came. 

And lot creation widened in man's view" 

The theory of Copernicus and the voyage of Columbus 
are the great historical moments of such change in the 

[18] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

thoughts of men. As travel thus discloses the amphtude 
of the planet and science fills the infinite of space for the 
learning mind, history in its turn peoples the "dark 
background and abysm of time. " But more marvellous 
than the unveiling of time and space, is that last revela- 
tion which unlocks the inward world of idea and emotion, 
and gives soHdity to fife as by a third dimension. It is 
this world which is the realm of imaginative Hterature; 
scarcely by any other interpreter shall a man come into 
knowledge of it with any adequacy; and here the subject 
draws to a head, for it is by the operation of Hterature in 
this regard that the race-mind takes possession of the 
world. 

We are plunged at birth in medias resy as the phrase is, 
into the midst of things — into a world already old, of old 
ideas, old feelings, old experience, that has drunk to the 
lees the wisdom of the preacher of Ecclesiastes, and re- 
news in millions of lives the life that has been lived a 
million times ; a world of custom and usage, of imme- 
morial habits, of causes prejudged, of insoluble prob- 
lems, of philosophies and orthodoxes and things es- 
tablished; and yet, too, a world of the undiscovered. 
The youth awakes in this world, intellectually, in litera- 
ture; and since the literature of the last age is that on 
which the new generation is formed, he now first comes 
in contact with the large Hfe of mankind in the litera- 

[19] 



THE TORCH 

ture of the last century. It is an extraordinary miscella- 
neous literature, varied and copious in matter, full of 
conflicting ideas, cardinal truths, and hazardous guesses; 
and for the young mind the problem of orientation — 
that is of finding itself, of knowing the true East, is 
diflicult. Literature, too, has an electric stimula- 
tion, and in the first onrush of the intellectual life brings 
that well-known storm and stress which is the true 
awakening; with eager and delighted surprise the soul 
feels fresh sensibilities and unsuspected energies rise in 
its being. It is a time of shocks, discoveries, experiences 
that change the face of the world. Reading the poets, the 
youth finds new dynamos in himself. A new truth un- 
seals a new faculty in him ; a new writer unlooses a new 
force in him; he becomes, Hke Briareus, hundred- 
handed, like Shakspere, inyriad-minded. So like a 
miracle is the discovery of the power of Kfe. 

Let me illustrate the experience in the given case — 
the literature of the nineteenth century. It will all fall 
under three heads: the world of nature's frame, the 
world of man's action, the world of God's being. Na- 
ture is, in the first instance, a spectacle. One may see the 
common sights of earth, and still have seen little. The 
young eye requires to be trained in what to see, what to 
choose to see out of the vague whole, and so to see his true 
self reflected there in another form, for in the same land- 

[20] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

scape the farmer, the miHtary engineer, the painter see 
each a different picture. Burns teaches the young heart 
to see nature realistically, definitely, in hard outline, and 
always in association with human life — and the pres- 
ence of animals friendly and serviceable to man, the life 
of the farm, is a dominant note in the scene. Byron 
guides the eye to elemental grandeur in the storm and 
in the massiveness of Alp and ocean. Shelley brings out 
colour and atmosphere and evokes the luminous spirit 
from every star and dew-drop and dying wave. Tenny- 
son makes nature an artist's easel where from poem to 
poem glows the frescoing of the walls of life. Thus 
changing from page to page the youth sees nature with 
Burns as a man who sympathizes with human toil, with 
Byron as a man who would mate with the tempest, with 
Shelley as a man of almost spiritualized senses, with 
Tennyson as a man of artistic luxury. Again, nature is an 
order, a law in matter, such as science conceives her; and 
this phase appears inceptively in *'Queen Mab "and ex- 
plicitly in " In Memoriam," and many a minor poem of 
Tennyson, not the less great because minor in his work, 
in which alone the scientific spirit of the age has found 
utterance equal to its own sublimity. Yet, again, nature 
is a symbol, an expression of truth itself in another 
medium than thought; and so, in minute ways. Burns 
moraUzed the " Mountain Daisy, " and Wordsworth the 

[21] 



THE TORCH 

"Small Celadine;" and, on the grand scale, Shelley 
mythologized nature in vast oracular figures of man's 
faith, hope, and destiny. And again, naijure is a moulding 
influence so close to human life as to be a spiritual pres- 
ence about and within it. This last feehng of the partici- 
pation of nature in hfe is so fundamental that no master 
of song is without it ; but, in this group, Wordsworth is 
pre-eminent as its exponent, with such directness, cer- 
tainty and power did he seize and express it. What he 
saw in his dalesmen was what the mountains had made 
them ; what he told in " Tintem Abbey " was nature 
making of him; what he sang in his lyric of ideal 
womanhood was such an intimacy of nature with wo- 
man's being that it was scarcely to be divided from her 
spirit. The power which fashions us from birth, sustains 
the vital force of the body, and feeds its growing func- 
tions, seems to exceed the blind and mute region of mat- 
ter, and feeding the senses with colour, music and de- 
Hght shapes the soul itself and guides it, and supports 
and consoles the child it has created in mortahty. I do 
not overstate Wordsworth's sense of this truth; and it is 
a truth that twines about the roots of all poetry like a 
river of hfe. It explains to the growing boy something in 
his own history, and he goes on in the paths he has begun 
to follow, it may be with touches of vague mystery but 
with an expectant, receptive and responsive heart. In 

[22] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

regard to nature, then, the youth's Kfe under the favour 
of these poets appreciates her in at least these four ways, 
artistically, scientifically, symbolically and spiritually, 
and begins to fix in moulds of his own spirit that miracle 
of change, the Protean being of matter. 

To turn to the world of man's life, the simplest gain 
from contact with this Hterature of which I am speaking 
is in the education of the historic sense. Romance discov- 
ered history, and seeking adventure and thriving in what 
it sought, made that great find, the Middle Ages, which 
the previous time looked on much as we regard the civili- 
zation of China with mingled ignorance and contempt. 
It found also the Gael and the Northmen, and many an 
outlying region, many a buried tract of time. In Scott's 
novels characteristically, but also in countless others, in 
the rescued and revived ballad of England and the North, 
and in the renewed forms of Greek imagination, the his- 
toric sense is strongly drawn on, and no reader can es- 
cape its culture, for the place of history and its inspira- 
tional power in literature is fundamental in Ihe spirit of 
the nineteentli century. But what most arrests the young 
heart, in this world of man's life, is those ideas which we 
sum up as the Revolution, and the principle of democ- 
racy which is primary in the literature of the last age. 
There the three great words — liberty, fraternity and 
equaUty — and the theory that in Shelley was so burn- 

[23] 



THE TORCH 
ing an enthusiasm and in Byron so passionate a force, 
are still aflame ; and the new feeling toward man which 
was implicit in democracy is deeply planted in that 
aspect of fraternity which appears in the interest in the 
common lot, and in that aspect of liberty which appears 
in the sense of the dignity of the individual. Burns, Scott, 
Dickens illustrate the one; Byron, Shelley and Carlyle 
the other. The literature of the great watchwords, the 
literature of the life of the humble classes, the literature 
of the rebellious individual will — the latter flashing out 
many a wild career and exploding many a startling the- 
ory of how life is to be lived — are the very core and sub- 
stance of the time. The application of ideas to life in the 
large, of which Rousseau was so cardinal an example,, 
opens an endless field in a century so rich in discovery, 
so active in intellect and so plastic in morals ; and here 
one may wander at will. Here is matter for a Hfetime. 
But without particularizing, it is plain how variously, 
how profoundly and vividly through this literature the 
mind is exercised in the human world, takes on the 
colour, picturesqueness and movement of history, builds 
up the democratic social faith and develops the energy 
of individual freedom, and becomes a place for the ca- 
reer of great ideas. 

There remains the world of God's being, or to vary 
the phrase in sympathy with the mode of approach char- 

[24] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

acteristic of the nineteenth century, the world in which 
God is. It may be broadly stated that the notion of 
what used to be called an absentee God, a far-off Ruler 
overseeing by modes analogous to human administra- 
tion the affairs of earth as a distant province, finds no 
place in this literature of the last age. The note of thought 
is rather of the intimacy of God with his creation and 
with the soul of man. God is known in two ways; as an 
idea in the intellect and as an experience in the emo- 
tions; and in poetry the two modes blend, and often 
blur where they blend. Their habitual expression in the 
great poets of the age is in pantheistic forms, but this is 
rather a matter of form than of substance. The imma- 
nence of the divine is the root -idea; in Wordsworth it is 
an immanence of sublime power, seized through com- 
munion with nature; in Shelley, who was more pro- 
foundly human, it is an immanence of transcendent love, 
seized through his sense of the destiny of the universe 
that carries in its bosom the glory of life ; in Tennyson, 
in whom the sense of a veiled intellect was more deep, 
it is an immanence of mystery in both the outer and the 
inner world. In other parts of the field, God is also con- 
ceived in history, and there immanent as Providence. 
His immanence in the individual — a matter dark to 
any thought — is most explicitly set forth by Emerson. 
It is perhaps generally considered that in the literature 

[25] 



THE TORCH 
of the ninteenth century there is a large sceptical and 
atheistic element; but this is an error. Genius by its own 
nature has no part in the spirit that denies ; it is positive, 
affirms and creates. Its apparent denials will be found to 
be partial, and affect fragments of a dead past only; its 
denials are, in reaHty, higher and more universal affirm- 
ations. K Wordsworth appears to put nature in the place 
of God, or Shelley love, or Keats beauty, they only affirm 
that phase of the divine which is nighest to their 
own apprehension, affection and dehght. Their experi- 
ence of the divine governs and blends with their intel- 
lectual theory, sometimes, as I have said, with a blur of 
thought. Each one's experience in these things is for 
himseK alone, and private; the ways of the Spirit no 
man knows ; but it is manifest that for the opening mind, 
whether of youth or of older years, the sense of eternity, 
however deHcate, subtle and silent is its realm, is fed 
nobly, sweetly and happily, by these poets in whom the 
spirit of man crying for expression unlocks the secrecy 
of its relations to the infinite. 

Such is the nature of the contact of the mind with 
literature by means of which it enters on its race inheri- 
tance of idea and emotion, takes possession of the stored 
results, clothes itself with energies whose springs are in 
the earhest distance of time, and builds up anew for it- 
self the whole and various worid as it has come to be 

[26] 



MAN AND THE RACE 

known by man in his age-long experience. The illus- 
tration I have employed minimizes the constancy, the 
completeness, the vastness of the process ; for it takes no 
account of other disciplines, of rehgious tradition and 
practice, of oral transmission, and of such universal and 
intimate formative powers as mere language. But it will 
be found on analysis that all of these depend, in the 
main, on Uterature in the broad sense; and, in the educa- 
tion of the soul in the higher Ufe, the awakening, the re- 
vealing and upbuilding force Hes, I am persuaded, in the 
pecuHar charge of Uterature in which the race-mind has 
stamped an image of itself. 

It is obvious that what I have advanced, brings the 
principle of authority into a cardinal place in hfe, and 
clothes tradition with great power. It might seem that 
the individual in becoming one with the race-mind has 
only to endue himself with the past as with a garment, to 
take its mould with the patience of clay, and to be in the 
issue a recast of the past, thinking old thoughts, feeling 
old emotions, doing old actions, in pre-established ways. 
But this is to misconceive the process by which the in- 
dividual effects this union ; he does not take the impress 
of the race-mind as the wax receives the imprint of the 
seal. This union is an act of life, a process of energy, joy 
and growth, of self-expression; here learning is living, 
and there is no other way to know the doctrine than to do 

[27] 



THE TORCH 

its will; so the race-mind is not copied, but is perpetu- 
ally re-born in men, and the world which each one of us 
thus builds for himself out of his preferred capacities, 
memories and desires — our farmer's, engineer's, 
painter's world, as I have said — is his own original and 
unique world. There is none like it, none. Originality 
consists in this re-birth of the world in the young soul. 
This world, nevertheless, the world of each of us, is not 
one of wilfulness, fantasy and caprice; if, on the one 
hand, it is such stuff as dreams are made of, on the other 
it is the stuff of necessity. It has a consistency, a law and 
fate, of its own, which supports, wields and sustains it. 
Authority is no more than the recognition of and obedi- 
ence to this underlying principle of being, whose will is 
disclosed to us in man's life so far as that life in its 
wholeness falls within our view; in knowledge of this 
will all wisdom consists, of its action in us all experience 
is woven, and in union with it all private judgment is 
confirmed. Authority, truly interpreted, is only another 
phase of that identity of the soul in all men by \artue of 
which society exists, and especially that intellectual 
state arises, that state which used to be called the repub- 
lic of letters and which is the institution of the race-mind 
to be the centre, the home and hope of civilization in all 
ages — that state where the unity of mankind is accom- 
plished in the spiritual unities of science, art and love. 

[28] 



MAN AND THE RACE 
To sum up these suggestions which I have thought it 
desirable to offer in order that the point of view taken in 
these lectures might, perhaps, be plain, I conceive of 
history as a single process in which through century 
after century in race after race the soul of man proceeds 
in a progressive comprehension of the universe and evo- 
lution of its own humanity, and passes on to each new 
generation its accumulated knowledge and developed 
energies, in their totality and without loss, at the acme 
of achievement. I conceive of this inheriting and be- 
queathing power as having its life and action in the race- 
mind. I conceive of literature as an organ of the race- 
mind, and of education as the process by which the in- 
dividual enters into the race-mind, becomes more and 
more man, and in the spiritual life mainly by means of 
literature. I conceive of the body of men who thus live 
and work in the soul as constituting the intellectual 
state, that republic of letters, in which the race-mind 
reaches, from age to age, its maximum of knowledge 
and power, in men of genius and those whose lives they 
illumine, move and direct; the unity of mankind is the 
ideal end of this state, and the freeing of the soul which 
takes place in it is its means. I conceive of the progres- 
sive life of this state, in civilization after civilization, as 
a perpetual death of the best, in culture after culture, for 
the good of the lower, a continuing sacrifice, in the history 

[29] 



THE TORCH 

of humanity, of man for mankind. And from this mys- 
tery, though to some it may seem only the recourse of in- 
tellectual despair, I pluck a confident faith in that im- 
perishable relation which man and his works contain, 
and which though known only in the continuity of 
the race-mind, I am compelled to believe, has eternal 
reality. 



[30] 



The Torch 
n 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 



The language of literature is the language of all the 
world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the 
notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech 
which constitutes the various tongues of the earth, and 
conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of 
all men. Words are intermediary between thought and t 
things. We express ourselves really not through words, 
which are only signs, but through what they signify — 
through things. Literature is the expression of life. The 
question, then, is — what things has literature found 
most effectual to express life, and has therefore habitu- 
ally preferred ? and what tradition in consequence of this 
habit of preference has been built up in all literatures, 
and obtained currency and authority in this pro- 
vince of the wider realm of all art ? It is an 
interesting question, and fundamental for any one 
who desires to appreciate literature understandingly. 

[33] 



THE TORCH 

Perhaps you will permit me to approach it somewhat 
indirectly. 

You are all familiar with something that is called 
poetic diction — that is, a selected language specially 
fitted for the uses of poetry ; and you are, perhaps, not 
quite so famiUar with the analogous feature in prose, 
which is now usually termed preciosity, or preciousness 
of language, that is, a highly refined and aesthetic diction, 
such as Walter Pater employs. The two are constant 
products of language that receives any literary cultiva- 
tion, and they are sometimes called diseases of language. 
Thus, in both early and late Greek there sprang up Ht- 
erary styles of expression, involving the preference of 
certain words, constructions and even cadences, and the 
teaching of art in these matters was the business of the 
Greek rhetorician ; so in Italy, Spain, and France, in the 
Renaissance, similar styles, each departing from the 
common and habitual speech of the time, grew up, and 
in England you identify this mood of language in Ehza- 
beth's day as Euphuism. The phenomenon is common, 
and belongs to the nature of language. Poetic diction, 
however, you perhaps associate most clearly with the 
mannerism in language of the eighteenth century in 
England, when common and so-called vulgar words were 
exiled from poetry, and Gray, for example, could not 
speak of the Eton schoolboys as playing hoop, but only 

[34] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

as " chasing the rolling circles' speed, " and when, to use 
the stock example, all green things were " verdant. " This 
is fixed in our memory because Wordsworth has the 
credit of leading an attack on the poetic diction of that 
period, both critically in his prefaces and practically in 
his verse; he went to the other extreme, and introduced 
into his poetry such homely words as "tub," for ex- 
ample; he held that the proper language of poetry is the 
language of common Ufe. So Emerson in his addresses, 
you remember, had recourse to the humblest objects for 
illustration, and shocked the formalism of his time by 
speaking of " the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan. " 
He was applying in prose the rule of Wordsworth in 
poetry. Walt Whitman represents the extreme of this use 
of the actual language of men. But if you consider the 
matter, you will see that this choice of the homely word 
only sets up at last a fashion of homeliness in the place of 
a fashion of refinement, and breeds, for instance, dia- 
lect poets in shoals ; and often the choice is really not of 
the word, but of the homely thing itself as the object of 
thought and expressive image of it; and in men so great 
as Emerson and Wordsworth the practice is a proof of 
that sympathy with common life which made them both 
great democrats. But in addition to the diction that 
characterizes an age, you must have observed that 
in every original writer there grows up a particular 

[35] 



THE TORCH 

vocabulary, structure and rhythm that he affects and 
that in the end become his mannerism, or distinct- 
ive style, so marked that you recognize his work by its 
stamp alone, as in Keats, Browning, and Swinburne in 
poetry, and in Arnold in prose. In other words there is at 
work in the language of a man, or of an age even, a con- 
stant principle of selection which tends to prefer certain 
ways and forms of speech to others, and in the end de- 
velopes a language characteristic of the age, or of the 
man. 

This principle of selection, whether it works toward 
refinement or homehness, operates in the same way. It 
must be remembered — and it is too often forgotten — 
that the problem of any artistic work is a problem of ,> 
economy. How to get into the two hours' traflBc of the 
stage the significance of a whole life, of a group of fives ; 
how to pack into a sixteen-line lyric a dramatic situation 
and there sphere it in its own emotion; how to rouse 
passion and pour it in a three-minute poem, fike Shel- 
ley's " Indian Air " — all these are problems in economy, 
by which speed, condensation, intensity are gained. 
Now words in themselves are colourless, except so far as 
their musical quafity is concerned; but the thing that a 
word stands for has a meaning of its own and usually a 
meaning charged with associations, and often this asso- 
ciative meaning is the primary and important one in its 

[36] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

use. A rose, for example, is but the most beautiful of 
flowers in itself, but it is so charged with association in 
men's Hves, and still more heavily charged with long use 
of emotion in Hterature, that the very word and mere 
name of it awakes the heart and sets a thousand mem- 
ories unconsciously vibrating. This added meaning is 
what I am accustomed to term an overtone in words; 
and it is manifest that, in view of the necessity for econ- 
omy in poetic art, those words which are the richest and 
deepest in overtone will be preferred, because of the 
speed, certainty and fullness they contain. The question 
will be what overtones in Hfe appeal most to this or that 
poet ; he will reproduce them in his verse ; Pope will use 
the overtones of a polished society, Wordsworth and 
Emerson those of humble life. Now our larger question 
is what overtones are characteristically preferred in 
great literature, in what objects do they most inhere, 
and in what way is the authoritative tradition of litera- 
ture, as respects its means of expression, thus built up ? 
It goes without saying that all overtones are either of 
thought or feehng. What modes of expression, then, 
what material objects, what forms of imagination, what 
abstract principles of thought, are most deeply charged 
with ideas and emotions ? It will be agreed that, as a 
mere medium, music expresses pure emotion most di- 
rectly and richly ; music seems to enter the physical 

[37] 



THE TORCH 

frame of the body itself, and move there with the warmth 
and instancy of blood. The sound of words, therefore, 
cannot be neglected, and in the melody and echo of 
poetry sound is a cardinal element; yet, it is here only 
the veining of the marble, it is not the material itself. In 
the objects which words summon up, there is sometimes 
an emotional power as direct and immediate as that of 
music itself, as for example, in. the great features of na- 
ture, the mountains, the plains, the ocean, which awe 
even the savage mind. But, in general, the emotional 
power of material objects is lent to them by association, 
that is by the human use that has been made of them, as 
on the plain of Marathon, to use Dr. Johnson's old illus- 
tration, it is the thought of what happened there that 
makes the spectator's patriotism "gain force" as he 
surveys the scene. This human use of the world is the 
fountain of significance in all imaginative and poetic 
speech; and in the broad sense history is the story of 
this human use of the world. 

History is so much of past experience as abides in 
race-memory; and underhes race-Hterature in the same 
way that a poet's own experience underhes his expres- 
sion of hfe. I do not mean that when a poet unlocks his 
heart, as Shakspere did in his sonnets, he necessarily 
writes his own biography; in the poems he writes there 
may be much of actual event as in Burns's love-songs, or 

[38] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

little as in Dante's " New Life." Much of a poet's experi- 
ence takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is 
oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the 
power, the purity and height of his utterance may not 
seldom be the greater because experience here uses the 
voices of desire. " All I could never be, " in Browning's 
plangent line, has been the mounting strain of the sub- 
limest and the tenderest songs of men. All Ireland could 
never be, thrills and sorrows on her harp's most resonant 
string, and is the master-note to which her sweetest 
music ever returns. All man could never be makes the 
sad majesty of Virgil's verse. As with a man, what a na- 
tion strongly desires is no small part of its life, and is the 
mark of destiny upon it, whether for failure or success ; 
so the note of world-empire is heard in the latest 
English verse, and the note of humanity — the service 
of all men — has always been dominant in our own. His- 
tory, then, must be thought of, in its relation to litera- 
ture, as including the desire as well as the performance 
of the race. 

History, however, in the narrowest sense, lies close to 
the roots of imaginative literature. The great place of 
history and its inspirational power in the literature of 
the last century I have already referred to ; it is one of the 
most important elements in the extraordinary reach and 
range of that splendid outburst of imagination through- 

[39] 



THE TORCH 

out Europe. Aristotle recognized the value of history as 
an aid to the imagination, at the very moment that he 
elevated poetry above history. In that necessary econo- 
my of art, of which I spoke, it is a great gain to have 
well-known characters and familiar events, such as 
Agamemnon and the " Trojan War," in which much is 
already done for the spectator before the play begins. 
So our present historical novelists have their stories half- 
written for them in the minds of their readers, and es- 
pecially avail themselves of an emotional element there, 
a patriotism, which they do not have to create. The use 
of history to the imagination, however, goes farther than 
merely to spare it the pains of creating character and in- 
cident and evoking emotion. It assists a literary move- 
ment to begin with race-power much as a poet's or — 
as in Dickens's case — a novelist's own experience aids 
him to develop his work, however much that experience 
may be finally transformed in the work. Thus the novel 
of the last age really started its great career from Scott's 
historic sense working out into imaginative expression, 
and in a lesser degree from so minor a writer as Miss 
Edgeworth in whose Irish stories — which were con- 
temporary history — Scott courteously professed to 
find his own starting point. It is worth noting, also, that 
the Elizabethan drama had the same course. Shakspere 
following Marlowe's example developed from the his- 

[40] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

torical English plays, in which he worked in Scott's 
manner, into his full control of imagination in the purely 
ideal sphere. History has thus often been the handmaid 
of imagination, and the foster-mother of great literary 
ages. Yet to vary Aristotle's phrase — poetry is all his- 
tory could never be. 

It appears to me, nevertheless, that history underlies 
race-literature in a far more profound and universal way. 
History is mortal: it dies. Yet it does not altogether die. 
Elements, features, fragments of it survive, and enter 
into the eternal memory of the race, and are there trans- 
formed, and — as we say — spiritualized. Literature is 
the abiding-place of this transforming power, and most 
profits by it. And to come to the heart of the matter, 
there have been at least three such cardinal trans- 
formations in the past. 

The first transformation of history is mythology. I do 
not mean to enter on the vexed question of the origin of 
mythologies; and, of course, in referring to history as its 
ground, I include much more than that hero-worship 
such as you will find elaborated or invented in Carlyle's 
essay on Odin, and especially I include all that experi- 
ence of nature and her association with human toil and 
moods that you will find delineated with such marvellous 
subtleness and fullness in Walter Pater's essay on 
Dionysus. In mythology, mankind preserved from his 

[41] 



THE TORCH 

primitive experience of nature, and his own heroic past 
therein, all that had any lasting significance; and, al- 
though all mythologies have specific features and a par- 
ticular value of their own, yet the race, coming to its best, 
as I have said, bore here its perfect blossom in Greek 
mythology. I know not by what grace of heaven, by 
what felicity of blend in climate, blood and the fortune 
of mortal Hfe, but so it was that the human soul put forth 
the bud of beauty in the Greek race; and there, at the 
dawn of our own intellectual civiHzation and in the first 
sunrise of our poetry in Homer, was found a world filled 
with divine — with majestic and lovely figures, which 
had absorbed into their celestial being and forms the 
power of nature, the splendour and charm of the ma- 
terial sphere, the fructifying and beneficient opera- 
tions of the external universe, the providence of the state 
and the inspiration of all arts and crafts, of games and 
wars and song ; each of these deities was a flashing centre 
of human energy, aspiration, rehance — with a realm 
and servants of its own ; and minghng wdth them in fair 
companionship was a company of demi-gods and heroes, 
of kings and princes, and of golden youths, significant of 
the fate of all young hfe — Adonis, Hippolytus, Orestes. 
This mythologic world was near to earth, and it mixed 
with legendary history, such history as the " Iliad " con- 
tained, and also with the private and public hfe of the 

[42] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

citizens, being the ceremonial religion of the state. It was 
all, nevertheless, the transformation that man had accom- 
plished of his own past, his joys and sorrows, his labours, 
his insights and desires, the deeds of his ancestors, — the 
human use that he had made of the world. This was the 
body of idea and emotion to which the poet appealed 
in that age, precisely as our historical novelists now ap- 
peal to our own knowledge of history and pre-estab- 
ished emotion with regard to it, our patriotism. Here 
they found a language already full charged with emotion 
and intelligence, of which they could avail themselves, 
and speaking which they spoke with the voices of a 
thousand years. Nevertheless, it was at best a language 
like others, and subject to change and decay in expres- 
sive power. The time came when, the creative impulse in 
mythology having ceased and its forms being fixed, the 
mythic world lay behind the mind of the advancing race 
which had now attained conceptions of the physical 
universe, and especially ideas of the moral life, which 
were no longer capable of being held in and expressed 
by the the mythic world, but exceeded the bounds of ear- 
lier thought and feeling and broke the ancient moulds. 
Then it was that Plato desired to exile the poets and their 
mythology from the state. He could not be content, 
either, with a certain change that had occurred ; for the 
creative power in m3i;hology having long ceased, as I 

[43] 



THE TORCH 

have said, the imagination put forth a new function — a 
meditative power — and brooding over the old fables of 
the world of the gods discovered in them, not a record 
of fact, but an allegorical meaning, a higher truth which 
the fable contained. Mythology passed thus into an em- 
blematic stage, in which it was again long used by man- 
kind, as a language of universal power. Plato, however, 
could not free himself from the mythologic habit of im- 
agination so planted in his race, and found the most ef- 
fective expression for his ideas in the myths of his own 
invention which he made up by a dexterous and poetic 
adaptation of the old elements; and others later than 
Plato have found it hard to disuse the mythologic lan- 
guage ; for, although the old rehgion as a thing of faith and 
practice died away, it survived as a thing of form and 
feature in art, as a phase of natural symboUsm and of 
inward loveliness of action and passion in poetry, as a 
chapter of romance in the history of the race; and the 
modern literatures of Europe are, in large measure, 
unintelHgible without this key. 

The second great transformation of history is chivalry. 
Here the phenomenon is nearer in time and lies more 
within the field of observation and knowledge ; it is pos- 
sible to trace the stages of the growth of the story of Ro- 
land with some detail and precision; but, on the other 
hand, the Arthur myth reaches far back into the be- 

[44] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

ginnings of Celtic imagination, and all such race-myths 
tend to appropriate and embody in themselves the char- 
acteristic features both of one another and of whatever is 
held to be precious and significant in history or even in 
classical and Eastern legend. The true growth, however, 
is that feudal culture, which we know as knighthood, 
working out its own ideal of action and character and 
sentiment on a basis of bravery, courtesy, and piety, 
and thereby generating patterns of knighthood, typical 
careers, and in the end an imaginative interpretation of 
the purest spiritual Hfe itself in the various legends of 
the Holy Grail. As in the pagan world the forms and 
fables of mythology and their interaction downward with 
the human world furnished the imaginative interpreta- 
tion of life as it then was, so for the mediaeval age, the 
figures and tales of chivalry and their interaction upward 
with the spiritual world of Christianity, and also with the 
magic of diabohsm round about, furnished the imagina- 
tive interpretation of that later Hfe It was this new body 
of ideas and emotion in the minds of men that the me- 
diaeval poets appealed to, availed themselves of, and so 
spoke a language of imagery and passion that was a 
world-language, charged as I have said with the thought 
and feeling, the tradition, of a long age. What happened 
to the language of mythology, happened also to this lan- 
guage; it lost the power of reality, and men arose who, 

[45] 



THE TORCH 
being in advance of its conceptions of life, desired to ex- 
ile it, denounce it or laugh it out of existence, like 
Ascham in England, and Cervantes in Spain. It also 
suffered that late change into an allegorical or emble- 
matic meaning, and had a second life in that form as in 
the notable instance of Spenser's "Faerie Queene." It 
also could not die, but — just as mythology revived 
in the Alexandrian poets for a season, and fed Theo- 
critus and Virgil — chivalry was re-bom in the last cen- 
tury, and in Tennyson's Arthur, and in Wagner's " Par- 
sifal " lived again in two great expressions of ideal life. 

The third great transformation of history is contained 
in the Scriptures. The Bible is, in itself, a singularly 
complete expression of the whole life of a race in one 
volume — its faith and history blending in one body of 
poetry, thought and imaginative chronicle. It contains a 
celestial world in association with human events ; its pa- 
triarchs are like demi-gods, and it has heroes, legends, 
tales in good numbers, and much romantic and passion- 
ate life, on the human side, besides its great stores of 
spirituality. In literary power it achieves the highest in 
the kinds of composition that it uses. It is as a whole, 
regarded purely from the human point of view, not un- 
fairly to be compared in mass, variety, and scope of ex- 
pression, with mythology and chivalry as constituting a 
third great form of imaginative language; nor has its his- 

[46] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
tory been dissimilar in the Christian world to which it 
came with something of that same remoteness in time and 
reality that belonged equally to mythology and chivalry. 
It was first used in a positive manner, as a thing of fact 
and solid belief; but there soon grew up, you remember, 
in the Christian world that habit of finding a hidden 
meaning in its historical record, of turning it to a parable, 
of extracting from it an allegorical signification. It be- 
came, not only in parts but as a whole, emblematic, and 
its interpretation as such was the labour of centuries. 
This is commonly stated as the source of that universal 
mood of allegorizing which characterized the mediseval 
world, and was as strongly felt in secular as in religious 
writers. Its historical tales, its theories of the uni- 
verse, its cruder morals in the Jewish ages, have been 
scoffed at, just as was the case with the Greek myth, from 
the Apostate to Voltaire and later; but how great are its 
powers as a language is seen in the completeness with 
which it tyrannized over the Puritan life in England and 
made its history, its ideas, its emotions the habitual and 
almost exclusive speech of that strong Cromwellian age. 
In our country here in New England it gave the mould 
of imagination to our ancestors for two whole centuries. 
A book, which contains such power that it can make 
itself the language of life through so many centuries and 
in such various peoples is to be reckoned as one of the 

[47] 



THE TORCH 

greatest instruments of race-expression that man 
possesses. 

Mythology, chivalry, the Scriptures are the tongues of 
the imagination. It is far more important to know them 
than to leam French or German or ItaUan, or Latin or 
Greek; they are three branches of that universal lan- 
guage which though vainly sought on the Ups of men is 
found in their minds and hearts. To omit these in edu- 
cation is to defraud youth of its inheritance; it is like de- 
stroying a long-developed organ of the body, like putting 
out the eye or silencing the nerves of hearing. Nor is it 
enough to look them up in encyclopaedias and notes, and 
so obtain a piecemeal information; one must grow fa- 
miUar with these forms of beauty, forms of honour, forms 
of righteousness, have something of the same sense of 
their reality as that felt by Homer and Virgil, by the 
singer of " Roland " and the chronicler of the " Mort d* 
Arthur," by St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. He must 
form his imagination upon these idealities, and load his 
heart with them; else many a masterpiece of the human 
spirit will be lost to him, and most of the rest will be im- 
paired. If one must know vocabulary and grammar 
before he can understand the speech of the mouth, much 
more must he know well mythology, chivalry and Bible- 
lore before he can take possession of the wisdom that the 
race-mind has spoken, the beauty it has moulded life 

[48] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
into, as a thing of passion and action, the economy of 
lucid power it has achieved for perfect human utterance, 
in these three fundamental forms of a true world-lan- 
guage. The literature of the last century is permeated 
with mythology, chivalry and to a less degree with 
Scripture, and no one can hope to assimilate it, to re- 
ceive its message, unless his mind is drenched with these 
same things ; and the further back his tastes and desires 
lead him into the literature of earher times, the greater 
will be his need of this education in the material, the 
modes and the forms of past imagination. 

It may be that a fourth great tongue of the imagina- 
tion is now being shaped upon the living lips of men in 
the present and succeeding ages. If it be so, this will be 
the work of the democratic idea, which is now still at the 
beginning of its career; but since mythology and chivalry 
had their development in living men, it is natural to 
suppose that the human force is still operative in our 
own generation as it once was in those of Hellenic and 
mediaeval years. The characteristic hterature of de- 
mocracy is that of its ideas, spiritualized in Shelley, and 
that of the common lot as represented in the sphere of 
the novel, spiritualized most notably in Victor Hugo. In 
our own country it is singular to observe that the demo- 
cratic idea, though efficient in politics, does not yet es- 
tabhsh itself in imaginative literature with any great 

[49] 



THE TORCH 

power of brilliancy, does not create great democratic 
types, or in any way express itself adequately. This 
democratic idea, in Dickens for example, uses the ex- 
perience of daily life, that is, contemporary history, or at 
least it uses an artistic arrangement of such experience; 
but the novel as a whole has given us in regard to the 
common lot, rather a description of hfe in its variety than 
that concentrated and essential significance of Hfe which 
we call typical. If democracy in its future course should 
evolve such a typical and spiritualized embodiment of 
itself as chivalry found in Arthur and the Round 
Table, or as the heroic age of Greece found in Achilles 
and the Trojan War, or as the genius of Rome found 
in Aeneas and his fortunes, then imagination — race- 
imagination will be enriched by this fourth great instru- 
ment ; but this is to cast the horoscope of too distant an 
hour. I introduce the thought only for the sake of includ- 
ing in this broad survey of race-imagination that expe- 
rience of the present day, that history in the contempo- 
rary process of being transformed, out of which the mass 
of the books of the day are now made. 

Let me recur now to that principle of selection which 
through the cumulative action of repeated preferences of 
phrase and image fixes a habit of choice which at last 
stamps the diction of a man, a school or an age. It is 
plain that in what I have called the transformation of 

[50] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
history, of which Hterature is the express image, there is 
the same principle of selection which, working through 
long periods of race-life, results at last in those idealities 
of persons and events in which inhere most powerfully 
those overtones of beauty, honour and righteousness 
that the race has found most precious both for idea 
and emotion; and to these are to be added what I have 
had no time to include and discuss, the idealities of 
persons and events found outside mythology, chivalry 
and Scripture, in the work of individual genius like 
Shakspere, which nevertheless have the same ground 
in history, in experience, that in them is similarly 
transformed. Life-experience spiritualized is the formula 
of all great literature ; it may range from the experience 
of a single life, like Sidney's in his sonnets to that of an 
empire in Virgil's " Aeneid, " or of a religion in Dante's 
" Comedy. " In either case the formula which makes 
it literature is the same. I have illustrated the point 
by the obvious spiritualizations of history. Race- 
life, from the point of view of literature, results at last 
in these moulds of imagination, and all else though 
slowly, yet surely, drops away into oblivion. In truth, it 
is only by being thus spiritualized that anything human 
survives from the past. The rose, I said, has been so dip- 
ped in human experience that it is less a thing of nature 
than a thing of passion. In the same way Adonis, Jason 

[51] 



THE TORCH 

and Achilles, Roland and Arthur, Lancelot, Percival and 
Galahad, Romeo and Hamlet have drawn into them- 
selves such myriads of human hves by admiration and 
love that from them everything material, contemporary 
and mortal has been refined away, and they seem to all 
of us Hke figures moving in an immortal air. They have 
achieved the eternal world. To do this is the work of art. 
It may seem a fantastic idea, but I will venture the say- 
ing of it, since to me it is the truth. Art, I suppose, you 
think of as the realm and privilege of selected men, of 
sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, men of genius and 
having something that has always been called divine in 
their faculty; but it appears to me that art, like genius, 
is something that all men share, that it is the stamp of the 
soul in every one, and constitutes their true and imma- 
terial life. The soul of the race, as it is seen in history 
and disclosed by history, is an artist soul; its career is an 
artistic career; its unerring selective power expels from 
its memory every mortal element and perserves only the 
essential spirit, and thereof builds its ideal imaginative 
world through which it finds its true expression ; its more 
perfect comprehension of the world is science, its more 
perfect comprehension of its own nature is love, 
its more perfect expression of its remembered 
life is art. Mankind is the grandest and surest 
artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, 

[52] 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the 
beautiful soul. 

It appears, then, that the language of literature in the 
race is a perfected nature and a perfected manhood and 
a perfected divinity, so far as the race at the moment can 
see toward perfection. The life which hterature builds 
up ideally out of the material of experience is not wholly 
a past life, but there mingles with it and at last con- 
trols it the hfe that man desires to Hve. Fullness of hfe — 
that fullness of action which is poured in the epic, that 
fullness of passion which is poured in the drama, that 
fullness of desire that is poured in the lyric — the life 
of which man knows himself capable and realizes as the 
opportunity and hope of hfe — this is the Hfe that liter- 
ature enthrones in its dream. You have heard much of 
the will to believe and of the desire to Uve : Hterature is 
made of these two, warp and woof. Race after race be- 
Heves in the gods it has come to know and in the heroes 
it has borne, and in what it wishes to beHeve of divine 
and human experience ; and the Hfe it thus ascribes to its 
gods and to its own past is the Hfe it most ardently desires 
to Hve. Literature, which records this, is thus the chief 
witness to the nobiHty, the constancy and instancy of 
man's effort for perfection. What wonder, then, if in his 
subHmest and tenderest song there steals that note of 
melancholy so often struck by the greatest masters in 

[53] 



THE TORCH 
the crisis and climax of their works, and which, when so 
struck, has more of the infinite in it, more of the human 
in it, than any other in the slowly triumphant theme ! 

To sum up — the language of literature is experience ; 
the language of race-literature is race-experience, or his- 
tory, the human use that the race has made of the world. 
The law appears to be that history in this sense is slowly 
transformed by a refining and spiritualizing process into 
an imaginative world, such as the world of mythology, 
chivalry or the Scriptures, and that this world in turn 
becomes emblematic and fades away into an expression 
of abstract truth. The crude beginning of the process is 
seen in our historical fiction ; the height of it in Arthur 
or in Odin ; the end of it in the symbolic or allegoric in- 
terpretation of even so human a book as Virgil's " Ae- 
neid. " Human desire for the best enters into this process 
with such force that the record of the past slowly 
changes into the prophecy of the future, and out of the 
passing away of what was is built the dream of what 
shall be; so arises in race-life the creed of what man 
wishes to believe and the dream of the life he desires to 
live; this human desire for belief and for life is, in the 
final analysis, the principle of selection whose operation 
has been sketched, and on its validity rests the validity 
and truth of all literature. 

[54] 



The Torch 
III 



THE TITAN MYTH 



I propose to-night to illustrate by the specific example of 
the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology is a 
tongue of the imagination — a living tongue of the uni- 
versal imagination of men. 

The Titan Myth — I wonder what it means to you ? 
The Titans were the earliest children of the earth, elder 
than the Greek gods even, and were the sons of the 
the Earth, their mother. You perhaps think of them as 
mere giants, such as Jack killed -—mediaeval monsters 
of the kin of Beauty and the Beast. Think of them 
rather as majestic forms, with something of the sweep 
and mystery of those figures you may remember out of 
Ossian and his misty mountains, with the largeness and 
darkness of the earth in them, a massive dim-featured 
race, but with an earthly rather than celestial grandeur, 
embodiments of mighty force dull to beauty, intelligence, 
light. When Zeus, the then young Olympian, was bom, 

[57] 



THE TORCH 

and with him the other deities of the then new divine 
world and when he dethroned his father, and put the new 
gods in possession of the universe, these children of the 
old regime, misliking change, took the father's part, and 
warred on the usurper of ancient power, and were over- 
thrown by his lightnings, and mountains were piled on 
them; and now you may read in Longfellow of Encela- 
dus, the type and image of their fate, buried under 
iEtna whose earthquakes are the struggling of the great 
Titan beneath. This was the war of the Titans and the 
gods. One of the Titans, however, stood apart from the 
rest, being wiser than they. Prometheus made friends 
with Zeus, but his fortune was not less grievous to him; 
for when he saw that Zeus took no account of men — " of 
miserable men, " but yearned to destroy them from the 
face of the earth, he took pity on mankind, and stole for 
them the celestial fire and gave it to them, for until then 
man had lived a life of mere nature, without knowledge, 
or any arts, not even that of agriculture. Prometheus was 
the fire-bringer; and, bringing fire, he brought to men all 
the uses of fire, such as metal-working, for example, and 
in a word he gave to mankind its entire career, the long 
labour of progressive civilization, and the life of the 
spirit itself which is kindled, as we say, from the Pro- 
methean spark within. It was but a step for the Pagan 
imagination, at a later stage, to think of this patron of 

[58] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

mankind as the creator of men, since he was the fosterer 
of their Hves ; it was said that he had made clay images, 
and moistened these with holy water, so that they be- 
came Uving creatures — men. Zeus was angered by this 
befriending of the human race; and he flung Prome- 
theus upon a mountain of the Caucasus, chained him 
there, and planted a vulture to eat always on his entrails; 
and in the imagination of men there he hangs to this day. 
Yet there was one condition on which he might be re- 
leased and again received into heaven. He alone knew 
the secret of the fall of Zeus — the means by which it 
would be brought about ; and if he would tell this secret, 
so that Zeus might avoid the danger as was possible, and 
thereby his unjust reign become perpetual, Prometheus 
might save himself. But the Titan so loved justice that he 
kept silence, kno^dng that in the course of ages at last 
Zeus would fall. This was the m}i;h of Prometheus. 

Of the aspects which the entire legend presents in 
literature, there are three which stand out. I shall ask 
you to consider the first as the cosmic idea — the idea of 
the law of human progress that it contains. To the Greek 
mind the development of the universe consisted in the 
supplanting of a lower by a higher power, under the will 
of a supreme fate or necessity which was above both 
gods and men: after Uranus was Chronos, after Chro- 
nos was Zeus, after Zeus there would be other gods. The 

[59] 



THE TORCH 

Greeks were themselves a higher power in their world, 
and as such had conquered the Persians ; theirs was the 
victory of light over darkness, of civilization over bar- 
barism, and therefore on the walls of their great temple, 
the Parthenon, which was the embodiment of their spir- 
itualeconsciousness as a race, they depicted three great 
mythic events symbolizing the victory of the higher 
power — that is, the war of the Centaurs and the Lapi- 
thse, of the Athenians and the Amazons, and of the gods 
and the Titans. This cosmic idea — the Greek concep- 
tion of progress — it is more convenient to delay to the 
next lecture. Secondly, I shall ask you to consider the 
conception of the friend of man suffering for his sake — 
one that without irreverence may be designated as the 
Christ-idea. This phase of the myth naturally has re- 
ceived less development in literature, inasmuch as the 
ideas and emotions it embodies find expression inevit- 
ably and almost exclusively in the symbol of the Cross 
and the Hfe that led up thereto. But for those who, in the 
chances of time have stood apart from the established 
faith of Christendom, and have not seldom encountered 
the creed and practice of their age in persecution, being 
victims for the sake of reason — for these men, the 
figure of Prometheus has been in the place of the Cross, 
an image of themselves, their prototype. The expres- 
sion of this particular idea, however, has been slight 

[60] 



THE TITAN MYTH 
in literature; but it naturally appears there, and Pro- 
metheus has come to be the characteristic symbol of the 
peculiar suffering of genius; so Longfellow uses it 
in his "Prometheus." 

"All is but a symbol painted 

Of the Poet, Prophet , Seer; 
Only those are crowned and sainted 
Who with grief have been acquainted. 

Making nations nobler, freer." 

Under this aspect Prometheus is the martyr of humanity. 
Thirdly, I shall ask you to consider the conception of 
Prometheus, not as an individual, but as identified with 
mankind, as mankind itself suffering in all its race-Ufe 
and throughout its history, wretched, tyrannized over by 
some dark and unjust necessity, yet unterrified, reso- 
lute, invincible in its faith in that 

"One far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves. ^* 

The imagination, age after age, finds in Prometheus such 
a symbol of man's race-life. This is to conceive of Pro- 
metheus as the idea of humanity. 

iEschylus fixed the form of the Titan for the imagin- 
ation and surrounded it with the characteristic scene. 
He nailed Prometheus in chains riveted into the rock, the 

[61] 



THE TORCH 

vast desolate cliffs of the Caucasus, an indistinct and 
mighty figure, frosted with the night and watching the 
stars in their courses with lidless eyes, the dark vulture 
hovering in his bosom. Perhaps I can make the scene 
more real to you by a passage from a letter of a friend 
who last spring was in that solitude. " All the forenoon, " 
he says, "I have been travelHng forward beneath the 
giant wall of the frosty Caucasus. The snow-clad plain 
serves as a dazzKng foreground to the towering rugged 
peaks so sharply defined in steel white and dull black 
wherever the snow leaves the beetling rock bare. The 
gorges and ravines which are here and there visible look 
like old-time scars of jagged wounds on the sullen face of 
the mountains. The dreary solitude of the scene is very 
impressive. Far off yonder in the distance I can picture 
the chill and desolate \ailture-peak where Prometheus, 
in his galling chains, longed for the day to give peace to 
' starry -kirtled night' (if I remember my ^Eschylus 
rightly) and yearned for the sun to arise and dispell the 
hoar-frost of dawn. It all comes up again before my 
mind in this far-away solitary region. " Thither to tliis 
scene, that my friend describes, came with comfort or 
counsel the daughters of the Ocean, and old Oceanus 
himself, the Titan's brother, and lo on her wanderings, 
and Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, to make terms with 
Prometheus, or to inflict new tortures should he refuse. 

[62] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

But Prometheus remained the resolute and faithful suf- 
ferer : there stretched on the rock he would await the sure 
coming of that justice which is above even the heavens 
of Zeus and contains and orders even them. It is a sub- 
lime moral situation. Who could ever forget that figure, 
once stamped on his imagination, though but a school- 
boy ? So Byron remembered his Harrow days : " Of the 
* Prometheus ' of iEschylus, " he says : " I was passionate- 
ly fond as a boy. It was one of the Greek dramas we used 
to read three times a year at Harrow. Indeed, it and the 
Medea were the only ones, except the * Seven Against 
Thebes,' which pleased me. The ' Prometheus,' if not ex- 
actly in my plan has always been so much in my head 
that I well understand how its influences have passed 
into all I have done. " It goes with this acknowledg- 
ment, and bespeaks the critic's acute penetration, to 
find Jeffrey affirming that there is no work of modern 
literature that more than Byron's " Manfred " ap- 
proaches the " Prometheus " of iEschylus. Byron only 
illustrates the fascination that this myth has for the 
race; the world will never let go of this symbol of 
itself. 

The moment and the cause, the invincible resolution 
denying the will of the apparent gods of the hour in 
obedience to the higher light within, are the same that 
have nailed all martyrs to the cross, sent patriots to rot 

[63] 



THE TORCH 

in prisons, and borne on the leaders of all forlorn hopes 
in their death-charges, and of these the history of the last 
century gives many a modern instance. In our own 
time Siberia has been one vast Caucasus; I remember 
when not long ago its name was Crete; and now 'tis 
Macedonia — they are all tracts of that desolation that 
swallows up in its voiceless sohtude and buries from the 
ears of God and man the human cry. In the mind and 
memory of the race there are two great mountains ; over 
against Sinai towers the peak of the Caucasus with per- 
petual challenge ; yet they are twin peaks — one, the 
mount of faith in God, the other, the mount of faith in 
man. You know how the race, from time to time, as great 
moods sweep over it — the mood of asceticism, or of 
Christian chivalry, or of world-conquest, sets up some 
historic figure as the type and expression of this mood — 
some St. Francis, or PhiKp Sidney, or Napoleon ; this is 
because the race sees in these men a greater image of it- 
self in those particular moods. So, in a more abstract way 
the race takes some part of its self -consciousness — say, 
its perception of what is evil in its own heart — and puts 
it outside of itself so as to see it better, projects or ob- 
jectifies itself, as we say, in an image, Kke Mephisto- 
pheles ; it sees in Mephistopheles itself in a certain mood 
— a mood of mocking denial of all good. So, in its own 
history and memory the race perceives that often its 

[64] 



THE TITAN MYTH 
greatest men, those who have been its civilizers, have 
been victims of the powers of their day, and have served 
the race and carried on its Ufe by fidehty to their own 
hearts and the truth in them in spite of the utmost suf- 
fering that could be inflicted on them. The race thinks of 
these men as constituting its own hfe, gathers and blends 
them in one being and finds that being — the type that 
stands for its continuous hfe — in Prometheus. In him 
the race projects — as I have said — or objectifies itself 
in the mood of suffering the worst for the good of men, 
with undismayed courage and unbroken will. Prome- 
theus is man as he knows himself in history, the im- 
mortal sufferer under injustice bringing even by his 
sorrows the higher justice that shall at last 
prevail — he is this figure set clear and separate 
before the mind: he is the idea of humanity, 
conceived in the characteristic act of its noblest life — 
he is mankind. 

I dwelt in the last lecture on the treasure that the race- 
imagination possesses in the Greek myths, as a means of 
expression; in the whole inheritance of our hterature 
there is nothing that the poet finds so great a gift as these 
forms and tales of the mythic world in which the work 
of creation is already half done for him, and the storing 
of ideas and emotions has been accomphshed, so that 
with a word he can release in the mind the flood of mean- 

[65] 



THE TORCH 
ing they contain, as if he pushed an electric button ; they 
are to him what the common law is to a lawyer — the 
stored results of the past, in experience and principle; 
he has only to adopt them into his human verse, as he 
adopts into his verse of nature the Andes and Ararat. It 
was not surprising that such a tale as the Titan Myth 
should be among the chief memories of the race, never 
wholly forgotten; yet it waited for its moment. After the 
first mention of it in Hterature three thousand years went 
by, before the moment came. Then the French Revolu- 
tion struck its hour. It is true that the myth stirred in the 
Renaissance when all things Greek revived, and Cal- 
deron, the great Spanish poet, treated some minor as- 
pects of it; but, in and about the Revolution, it was 
handled repeatedly by great poets who strove to recast 
the story and use it to express the ideas and emotions 
of their own age. Goethe in his youth, and the Germans 
— Herder and Schlegel, each wrote a Prometheus ; in 
Italy Monti took the subject; in England Landor and 
Byron touched it Hghtly, and Keats and Shelley made it 
the matter of great poems ; and later, in France, where 
Voltaire had approached it, Victor Hugo and Edgar 
Quinet elaborated it; nor do these names exhaust the 
Ust of those who in the last century made it a principal 
theme of verse. This re-birth was a natural one; for the 
French Revolution, which you remember Wendell 

[66] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

Phillips in his great Harvard speech described as "the 
most unmixed blessing that ever befell mankind " — 
the French Revolution was rooted in the idea of hu- 
manity and was the cause of humanity. Moreover, the 
Revolution has a Titanic quality in itself; there is the 
feeling of large earth-might in the struggle of the heavy 
masses of the darkened people, peasant-born; and in 
their revolt against the kingdoms of the world whose 
serfs they were, there was the sense of a strife T\dth the 
careless luxury of the unjust gods; there was in the 
wretchedness of the European peoples the state of man 
that Prometheus pitied when he rebuked Zeus for taking 
no account of men — "of miserable men;" and in the 
tumult and ardour and invincible faith of the Revolu- 
tion there was both the Titanic atmosphere and the 
Promethean spirit. Shelley was the poet through whom 
the literary expression of the Revolution was to be 
poured. It is necessary to mark the time precisely. The 
Revolution had flamed, and in Napoleon, whom more 
than one poet celebrated as the Prometheus of the age, 
had apparently flamed out. The Revolution, as a politi- 
cal idea seemed to have failed, and Europe sank back 
into the arms of king and priest. It was then that these 
great Englishmen, Byron and Shelley, in their youth 
took up the fallen cause and bore it onward in their 
hands till Byron died for it in the war of Greek Inde- 

[67] 



THE TORCH 

pendence and Shelley, having sung his song, sank in the 
waters of the Mediterranean Sea. 

Shelley came to this subject naturally and through 
years of unconscious preparation ; and when the moment 
of creation came, he felt the Titanic quality, that I 
spoke of, in the Revolution, felt the Promethean security 
of victory it contained — felt, too, the Promethean suf- 
fering which was the heart of mankind as he saw it sur- 
veying Europe in his day, and knew it in his own bosom 
as well. He conceived of Prometheus as mankind, of his 
history and fate as the destiny of man ; and being full of 
that far sight of Prometheus which saw the victorious 
send — being as full of it as the wheel of Ezekiel was full 
of eyes — he saw, as the centre of all vision, Prometheus 
Unbound — the millennium of mankind. He imagined 
the process of that great liberation and its crowning 
prosperities. This is his poem. In this poem the Revolu- 
tion as a moral idea reached its height ; that is what 
makes it, from the social point of view, the race-point 
of view, the greatest work of the last century in creative 
imagination — for it is the summary and centre, in the 
world of art, of the greatest power in that century — the 
power of the idea of humanity. I shall present only the 
cardinal phases of the dramatic situation, in the poem, 
and of the moral idea by which it is solved. 

The poem opens in the Caucasus, with Prometheus 

[68] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

bound to the rock, an indistinct figure such as I have de- 
scribed him ; his form is left undefiined — he is a voice in 
the vast sohtudes; and his first speech, which discloses 
the situation, makes you aware of physical suffering, 
mental anguish, an undismayed and patient will, an un- 
conquerable faith — these are the quahties which make 
him an elemental being and characterize him at once. It 
is an iEschylean speech, phrases from iEschylus are 
welded into it ; but the moral grandeur of Prometheus — 
all, that is, except the historical and physical features of 
the scene — bears the creative mark of Shelley's own 
sublimity of conception. 

** Monarch of Gods and Daemons ^ and all Spirits 
Bid One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds 
Which Thou and I alone of living things 
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth 
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou 
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise, 
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts. 
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope. 
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate. 
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn 
O'er mine own m,isery and thy vain revenge. 
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours. 
And moments aye divided by keen pangs 
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude. 
Scorn and despair, — these are mine empire: — 

[69] 



THE TORCH 

More glorious Jar than that which thou surveyest 
From thine unenvied throne, O, Mighty God! 
Almighty f had I deigned to share the shame 
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here 
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain. 
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb. 
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. 
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! 

" No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. 
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt ? 
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, 
Has it not seen ? The Sea, in storm or calm. 
Heaven s ever-changing Shadow, spread below. 
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? 
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! 

" The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears 
Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains 
Eat with their burning cold into my bones. 
Heaven s winged hound, polluting from thy lips 
His beak in poison not his own, tears up 
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by. 
The ghastly people of the realm of dream. 
Mocking me: and the Earthquake- fiends are charged 
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds 
When the rocks split and close again behind: 
While from their loud abysses howling throng 
The genii of the storm, urging the rage 
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. 

[70] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

And yet to me welcome is day and nighty 

Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn. 

Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs 

The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead 

The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom 

— As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim — 

Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood 

From these pale feet, which then might trample thee 

If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. 

Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin 

Will hunt thee undefended through the wide Heaven! 

How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror. 

Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief 

Not exultation, for I hate no more. 

As then ere misery made me wise. The curse 

Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, 

Whose many-voiced Echoes, through the mist 

Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! 

Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost. 

Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept 

Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, 

Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! 

And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poised wings 

Hung mute and moveless o^er yon hushed abyss. 

As thunder, louder than your own, made rock 

The orbed world! If then my words had power. 

Though I am changed so that aught evil wish 

Is dead within; although no memory be 

Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! 

What was that curse ? for ye all heard me speak.** 

[71] 



THE TORCH 

Prometheus's character, you observe, is developed in 
the point that he no longer hates Zeus, but is filled with 
pity for him. Later in the scene the Furies enter, to tor- 
ure the Titan with new torments. What torments will be 
the most piercing to the suffering spirit of man — the 
spirit that suffers in advancing human welfare ? Will it 
not be the fact that the gifts he has given man have 
proved evil gifts, and that in the effort for perfection 
man has but the more heaped on himself damnation.^ 
The thought is found in many treatments of the myth •• 
Themis warned Prometheus that in aiding man with 
fire and the arts he only increased man's woes. It is the 
old pessimistic thought that civihzation is a curse — 
that the only growth of the soul is growth in the capacity 
for pain, for disillusion, for despair. Shelley introduces 
it in quite the Promethean spirit — as a thing, which if it 
be, is to be borne. What were the two characteristic 
failures of human hope in Shelley's eyes ? The capital 
instances ? They were the failure of Christianity to bring 
the millennium, and the failure of the French Revolu- 
tion in the same end — and not only their failure to 
bring the millennium, but, on the contrary, their in- 
fluence in still further confounding the state of mankind 
and flooding the nations with new miseries^ The Furies 
show these two failures to Prometheus in vision. The 
passage is somewhat involved as the vision is successive- 

[72] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

ly disclosed through the words of the chorus of Furies, 
of the attendant sisters lone and Panthea, and of Pro- 
metheus, but I will endeavour to make it plain ; 

" Chorus 
** The pale stars of the morn 
Shine on a misery ^ dire to be borne. 
Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn. 
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man? 
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran 
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever, 
Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever 
One came forth of gentle worth 
Smiling on the sanguine earth; 
His words outlived him, like swift poison 
Withering up truth, peace, and pity. 
Look! where round the wide horizon 
Many a million-peopled city 
Vomits smoke in the bright air. 
Mark that outcry of despair! 
T is his mild and gentle ghost 
Wailing for the faith he kindled: 
Look again, the flames almost 
To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled: 
The survivors round the embers 
Gather in dread. 
Joy, joy, joy! 
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers. 
And the future is dark, and the present is spread 
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. 

[73] 



THE TORCH 
" Semichorus I 

** Drops of bloody agony flow 
From his white and quivering brow. 
Grant a little respite now: 
See a disenchanted nation 
Springs like day from desolation; 
To Truth its state is dedicate^ 
And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; 
A legioned band of linked brothers 
Whom Love calls children — 

" Semichorus II 

" ' T is another's: 
See how kindred murder kin : 
'T is the vintage time for death and sin: 
Bloody like new wine, bubbles within: 
Till Despair smothers 
The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants win. 

[all the Furies vanish, except one] 
loNE. Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan 
Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart 
Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep. 
And beasts hear the sea Tnoan in inland caves. 
Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him? 
Panthea. Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more. 
loNE. What didst thou see ? 
Panthea. A woful sight: a youth 
With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. 
Ione. What next? 

[74] 



THE TITAN IVIYTH 

Panthea. The heaven around, the earth below 

Was peopled with thick shapes of human deaths 

AU horrible, and wrought by human hands. 

And some appeared the work of human hearts. 

For Tnen were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: 

And other sights too foul to speak and live 

Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear 

By looking forth: those groans are grief enough. 

Fury. Behold an emblem: those who do endure 

Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap 

Thousandfold torment on themselves and him. 

Prometheus. Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; 

Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow 

Stream not icith blood; it mingles with thy tears! 

Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death. 

So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix. 

So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. 

O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak. 

It hath become a curse. I see, I see 

The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just. 

Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee. 

Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home. 

An early-chosen, late-lamented home; 

As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind; 

Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells: 

Some — Hear I not the multitude laugh loud ? -^ 

Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms 

Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles. 

Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood 

By the red light of their own burning homes. 

[75] 



THE TORCH 

Fury. Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans; 

Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind. 

Prometheus. Worse? 

Fury. In each human heart terror survives 

The ruin it has gorged: the loftiest fear 

All that they would disdain to think were true: 

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds 

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. 

They dare not devise good for mans estate. 

And yet they know not thai they do not dare. 

The good ward power, hut to weep barren tears. 

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. 

The wise ward love; and those who love want wisdom; 

And all best things are thus confused to ill. 

Many are strong and rich, and would be just, 

Bui live among their suffering fellow-men 

As if none felt: they know not what they do. 

Prometheus. Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes; 

And yet I pity those they torture not. 

Fury. Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [Vanishes] 

Prometheus. Ah woe! 

Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, for ever! 

I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear 

Thy works within my woe-illumbd mind. 

Thou subtle tyrard! Peace is in the grave. 

The grave hides all things beautiful and good: 

I am a God and cannot find it there. 

Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge. 

This is defeat, fierce king, not victory. 

The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul 

[76] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

With new endurance ^ till the hour arrives 
When they shall he no types of things which are, 
Panthea. Alas! what sawest thou? 
Prometheus. There are two woes: 
To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one. 
Names are there. Nature's sacred watchwords, they 
Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry; 
The nations thronged around, and cried aloud^ 
As with one voice. Truth, liberty, and love! 
Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven 
Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear. 
Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil. 
This was the shadow of the truth I saw,'* 

The victory of Prometheus is in his declaration that 
he pities those who are not tortured by such scenes. He 
had already disclosed this pitiful heart in his first 
speech; and, desiring to hear the curse he had originally 
launched on Zeus, and being gratified in this wish by the 
Earth, he had revoked it: 

*' It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; 
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. 
I wish no living thing to suffer pain." 

Thus he had forgiven his great enemy. 

As I read the play, this forgiveness of Zeus by Pro- 
metheus makes the predestined hour of the downfall of 
Zeus. The chariot bears aloft the new principle of su- 

[77] 



THE TORCH 

preme being, a higher and younger-born principle, 
which exceeds that which Zeus embodied, just as Zeus 
had in his birth been a higher principle than the old 
reign contained; and Zeus is flung headlong, like Luci- 
fer, into the abyss of past things. Thus Shelley, as is the 
universal way of genius, had created a great work by 
fusing in it two divergent products of the human spirit 
— the Hellenic idea of a higher power superseding the 
lower, and the Christian idea that this power was one of 
non-resistance, of forgiveness, of love. The reign of love 
now begins in the poem: Prometheus is released and 
wedded with Asia, who stands for the spirit of nature, 
in which marriage is typified the union of the human 
soul with nature, the harmony of man and nature, and 
he shares in the millennium which is thus established on 
earth. 

At the end, you observe, the Titan Myth drops away ; 
it does not appear in the last acts ; for in it there was no 
such completion of the Promethean faith as Shelley de- 
scribes. 

And here I might end the discussion of Shelley's 
handling of the myth ; but I cannot refrain from direct- 
ing your attention to the marvellous power of the myth 
which could so blend the Greek and Christian genius, 
and contain the passion of the French Revolution 
issuing in the highest and most extreme forms of Chris- 

[78] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

tian ethics — in non-resistance, that is, and in the for- 
giveness of enemies. I say nothing of the practical wis- 
dom of this doctrine; what is it, but the old verses ? 

" But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil ; but whosoever 
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other 
also : '* 

but I desire that you should identify this wisdom with 
its moment of utterance. The French Revolution — 
the Revolution of the Terror and the block, of the 
burnt chateaux and the Napoleonic wars, was over and 
done with; Shelley, in whom its spirit burnt as the 
pure flame, had rejected its methods, while holding to 
its ideals. He had lifted it from a political to a moral 
cause: he had abandoned the sword as its Evangel, 
and he put persuasion in the place of force, and love 
in the place of hate, and the genius of victory which he 
invoked was the conversion of society by the stricken 
cheek and the lost cloak. The idea of humanity was the 
fountain of his thought and lhe armour of his argument. 
I will not refrain from saying that the idea of a suffer- 
ing humanity, which finds the path of progress in invin- 
cible opposition to the ruling gods of the hour in the faith 
in greater divinities to come, is properly crowned and 
consecrated by this doctrine, that patient forgiveness of 
the wrong is the essence of victory over it, and the sure 

[79] 



THE TORCH 

road to its downfall. But the significance of such a myth 
is not to be exhausted by one poet, or by one treatment; 
and in my next lecture I shall take up the work of Keats, 
Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel, in interpreting life, as 
they conceived it, by the same formula. 

I have left myself a moment to bring forward two 
considerations which may prove suggestive. The first is 
the analogy between Hebrew and Greek myths in the 
point that whereas in Eden the eating of the fruit of the 
knowledge of good and evil, whereby man became as 
God, was the occasion of man's ills, so in the myth of 
Greece the sharing of men in the divine fire was the cause 
of the sorrows of civilization. The second is that in the 
drama of the Book of Job there is a strong Hkeness to the 
situation in Prometheus, in the point that there is no 
action, but only a passive suffering in the principal 
character; and that in this suffering there is a dissent 
from the wisdom of Divine ways; that Job holds to his 
integrity and faith in his own righteousness in the face of 
all disaster and aU argument, in quite the Promethean 
spirit, obdurately ; and that he has the Promethean faith 
in the issue. The situation lies in the verse : 

** Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will 
maintain my ways before him." 

The dignity of the human soul is dramatically up- 
held at the great climax of Job's final assertion of 

[80] 



THE TITAN MYTH 
his righteousness; and the situation is solved only 
by the voice from the whirlwind declaring that as 
nature is a mystery, much more must human Ufe find 
mystery as an element of its being. But in this great 
drama — one of the marvellous works of human genius 
— though there is the presence of unjust suffering, of 
human integrity, and of a final victory of the right — 
there is no such clear presentation of the idea and its 
operation, as is found in the Promethean legend — the 
idea formulated in this mjrth by the race out of its 
knowledge of its own fife, not as a dramatic incident 
such as Job's, but as a pervading and constant law — 
the idea that the progress of man Ues in an immortal 
suffering, an invincible endurance of the injustice of 
the present world, in anticipation of the absolute justice 
known only to the prophetic heart within. This idea is a 
natural product of man's reflection on his history, a 
natural interpretation of his experience ; and he finds it 
imaginatively embodied in Prometheus more ade- 
quately and humanly than elsewhere. It has entered into 
thousands of fives in this last century of the Revolution, 
with both illumination and courage ; sharing in this idea, 
and the fife which is led in obedience to it, the humblest 
of men shares in the subfimity of the great Titan. 



[81] 



The Torch 

IV 



THE TITAN MYTH 
II 



The importance of history in literature can hardly be 
emphasized too much. I have not hesitated to speak of 
mythology and chivalry, and even of the Scriptures, as 
transformations of history, and of imaginative literature 
as the spiritual after-life both of historical events and con- 
ditions in the narrow sense, and of general human ex- 
perience in the broad sense. I have directed attention 
also to the influence of history in a more direct way, in 
the literature of the last century — to its inspirational 
power there; out of it came, in particular, the pictur- 
esqueness of the historical novel; and, inasmuch as the 
romantic spirit of the century explored all lands and 
times for new material, and eagerly absorbed all that 
travel or research brought forward new to the European 
mind, it naturally happened that the conception of his- 
torical humanity became one of rich variety; the formula 
— " many men, many minds " — received unending illus- 

[85] 



THE TORCH 

tration, and it might be thought that the result would 
have been to impress on the race a sense of hopeless di- 
versity in its members rather than of unbroken unity. 
But history had this inspirational power, not only in Ht- 
erature, but in philosophy; the mind of man was stimu- 
lated to find in all this new mass of different detail a 
single principle that would explain and reconcile the ap- 
parent confusion — to frame, that is, a philosophy of 
history. Herder, the German writer, was one of the most 
influential of the great men who attacked this problem; 
he gave his life to it. At the dawn of a new age, you 
know, there is often a singular phenomenon: men of 
genius arise, with a poetical cast of mind, and they are 
prophetic of the new day because they show forth some 
single idea or mood of it though they do not grasp the 
whole; they catch like morning clouds, some the red, 
some the gold, some the purple ray, but none of them 
gives that one white light which will prevail when the day 
is fully come. An outburst of poetry — the prevalence of a 
poetical view of things — is the sign of an advance along 
the whole line. Herder was a man of this kind; and it is 
easy now to say that his method was imperfectly scien- 
tific, and that his imagination and desire led him astray. 
Nevertheless he had one of those minds which, if it does 
not build a system squared of solid timber, flings seeds 
on every wind like a living tree. His intellect was capa- 

[86] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

cious, and in the attempt he made to include all things in 
his philosophizing he seems an anticipation of Herbert 
Spencer; in his theorizing, too, students find innumer- 
able thoughts — that are half -guesses — which are al- 
most the words of Darwin. He was, thus, you see, in the 
true path of advance; he caught the first gleams of the 
new hour of time. He was interested, over and above all 
else, in humanity and its destiny as disclosed in history. 
He saw in history the working of a law of beneficence 
and justice, which though it might not seem such when 
viewed in its means, always and unfailingly is such when 
viewed in its end; thus from the concourse and struggle 
of forces in civilization there is always issuing the slow 
triumph of reason. This was what Herder conceived as 
the law of progress ; and is the view taken in his leading 
prose works, the "Ideas on the History of Mankind" 
and the "Letters for the Furtherance of Humanity," 
which are still great and fruitful books. At the very end 
of a fife spent thus in meditation on the career of man in 
civilization. Herder set forth his faith in the principle of 
progress in a series of dramatic scenes built out of the 
myth of Prometheus. He identified the fire which was 
the Titan's characteristic gift to mortals, as civilization, 
and saw in it the two-fold symbol — first, of the arts 
themselves, secondly, of that divine soul which restlessly 
excites and spurs on all the powers of man. 

[87] 



THE TORCH 

I will sketch very briefly the story as Herder tells it. 
Prometheus has been long chained to the rock, and (as 
in Shelley's poem) time has ripened and softened his 
heart, partly because he knows that his work is prosper- 
ing among men. In the first scene he hears a distant song 
of victory, and voices announce to him that reason fruc- 
tifies the earth. In later scenes, first the daughters of the 
Ocean and old Oceanus himself come complaining that 
mankind disturbs the sea with ships, changes the course 
of the waters by dams and canals, and brings the ends of 
the earth together with commerce; but Prometheus re- 
plies, prophesying : — 

'"'The sea which girds the earth shall he the mediator and 
peace-maker of the nations." 

Then the Dryads, daughters of the earth come, with a 
similar tale; but Prometheus tells them that in the end 
man will make a garden of the earth; and other mytho- 
logical characters enter, each with its tale, Ceres, the 
goddess of harvest, who works with man — and Bac- 
chus, the giver of the vine : at last Hercules and Theseus 
release the Titan, all go before Themis, the goddess of 
justice who judges the cause between Prometheus and 
the gods, and gives the decision for Prometheus. Pallas 
then leads to Prometheus Agatia, the pure spirit of hu- 
manity, and the drama ends. You see the work is little 

[88] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

more than a series of picturesque classical tableaux, in 
which the victory of man through reason is set forth 
with a maintenance of self-sacrifice, perseverance, pa- 
tience, social labour and love as the essential elements of 
the moral ideal. 

A few years before, Schlegel had produced a Prome- 
theus in the form of a poem, in the same realm of his- 
tory but with much less scenic elaboration. In it he 
describes the Golden Age before the Titan War, the deso- 
late state of man after Zeus came to the throne, and how 
Prometheus made of clay a new race, and animated the 
clay with the heavenly fire. Themis reproves him for this 
act, and foretells the sorrows of this Promethean man — 
this being of divine desire chained to the earth and tyr- 
annized over by the thought of the past and of the future 
alike. But Prometheus believes, he says, that good will 
not die, that the toil of one generation will help the next, 
that human will reduces life to order and human action 
subdues nature; and that out of the midst of oppos- 
ing principles civilization grows to more and more. 
The law of progress is stated with sure optimism: 
though there may be ages of terror and apparent de- 
generation, yet the immortal principle of good in the 
race is such that it passes invulnerable through all 
history, and accomplishes the work of civilization. The 
poem is no more than a reply to the sad prophecy of 

[89] 



THE TORCH 

Themis, and perhaps incidentally to such reaction- 
aries as saw in the Reign of Terror and the Revolution 
generally the denial of progress and of the social 
ideal. 

But in the sphere of history, one of the latest rework- 
ings of the myth, the Prometheus of Quinet, the French 
poet, contains the most interesting variation. He con- 
ceived firmly the unity of history; and in obedience to this 
conception he endeavoured to unite the Greek myth with 
Christianity, not ethically as Shelley did, but historically. 
" If Prometheus " — he says in his preface — " is the 
eternal prophet, as his name indicates, each new age of 
humanity can put new oracles in the mouth of the Titan. 
Perhaps there is no character so well fitted to express the 
feelings — the premature and half melancholy desires 

— in which our age is enchained." In this spirit he wrote 
a drama in three parts : the first depicts the creation of 
man by Prometheus, the gift of fire — that is, the soul 

— and the beginning of life in sorrow. The second part 
depicts the suffering of Prometheus on Caucasus, in 
which the foreknowledge of the fall of Zeus becomes a 
prophecy of Christ's coming. The third act depicts the 
advent of Christianity. The Archangels, Raphael and 
Michael descend on Caucasus, and release Prometheus, 
who rises transfigured; the gods of Olympus prostrate 
themselves before him and the angels, and pray in vain 

[90] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

for life. Then Prometheus has a singular thought which 
to me is the most dramatic in the play: as he hstens to 
the death-song of the gods, his mind is clouded with a 
doubt : — will not the new divinity also pass away ? — 
and does he not already see a new Caucasus before him 
in the distant time ? — will he not be bound again ? — 
The angels comfort him, and he ascends to heaven ; but 
as he disappears in that hierarchy of celestial peace and 
love, he still wears the shadow of thought — for he re- 
members that on earth men still suffer. This attempt at a 
true synthesis of the Greek and Christian imagination — 
in behalf of the unity of history — is a most interesting 
illustration of the spirit of the century ; which was on the 
whole a century of peace-making between the great his- 
toric elements of spiritual civiHzation, a drawing to- 
gether and harmonizing of religions, philosophies and 
half -developed and fragmentary doctrines, by virtue of 
the identical principle they contain; or as Herder said, 
in consequence of that symmetry of human reason 
which makes all nobler minds tend to think the same 
thoughts. 

Interesting as the historical point of view is, it is plain 
that the myth loses something of its poetical quality, be- 
comes pure allegory, becomes almost mechanical; it be- 
comes, in fact, what is called poetical machinery, a hard 
and fast means of figurative expression. The characters 

[91] 



THE TORCH 

in Herder and Schlegel move like marionettes, and you 
hear the voice of the author apart from his work. Let us 
turn to a mind in which the myth really was alive again, 
with creative as well as expressive power — the mind of 
Keats. In his " Hyperion," the tale is of the Titans im- 
mediately after their overthrow; they have been de- 
throned from power, Saturn is an exile hiding in the 
deep glens, but their ruin is still incomplete; Hyperion 
still is lord in the sun, and the others are at liberty to 
gather for a great council. In order to display the idea of 
Keats, let me approach it indirectly. The point of vaew 
which he takes has much affinity with science — more, 
that is, than with either history or ethics. Modem the- 
ories of evolution have accustomed our minds to the 
conception of an original state of the universe, vast, 
homogeneous, undiversified, simple; out of this — to 
adopt the nebular theory — slowly great masses con- 
glomerated, gathered into sun and planets; and out of 
these arose finally H\dng things on a smaller scale but of 
higher perfection of being. Now if you will think of 
man's progressive conceptions of the divinity as some- 
thing similar to this, as parallel to it, you will have 
Keats's idea. In the beginning were the vast, vague, un- 
defined, half-unconscious beings, hke Uranus, the heav- 
ens, and Gaia, the earth, and Chronos, time; to them 
succeeded the more conscious and half-humanized 

[92] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

brood of the Titans, like the sun and planets, as it were; 
last came the gods of Olympus, in the perfection of full 
humanity, and on the physical scale of man in form, 
feature and spirit. The change from the Titanic to the 
Olympian rule, was like the change from one geological 
age of vast forms of brute and vegetable life to another 
of smaller but nobler species. The higher principle dis- 
places the lower, according to that Greek idea of pro- 
gress which I have described; and this successive dis- 
placement of the lower by the higher is the law of devel- 
opment in the Universe. 

In Keats's poem, Oceanus, speaking to the Titans 
in council as the wisest of them all, sets forth the matter 
plainly, and I should like you to notice how the concep- 
tion of a progressive order in nature (not as hitherto in 
civilization merely) and the conception of the necessity 
of accepting truth, bear the mark of the scientific spirit. 
Oceanus thus speaks : — 

" We fall hy course of Nature's laWy not force 
Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou 
Hast sifted well the atom-universe; 
But for this reason, that thou art the King^ 
And only blind from sheer supremacy. 
One avenue was shaded from thine eyes. 
Through which I wandered to eternal truth. 
And first, as thou wast not the first of powers, 

[93] 



THE TORCH 

So art thou rwt the last; it cannot beg 

Thou art not the beginning nor the end. 

From duws and 'parental darkness came 

Lighty the first fruits of that intestine broil. 

That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends 

Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came. 

And with it light, and light engendering 

Upon its own producer, forthwith touched 

The ivhole enormous matter into life. 

Upon thai very hour, our parentage, 

The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest: 

Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race. 

Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms. 

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom H is pain; 

O folly! for to bear all naked truths. 

And to envisage circumstance, all calm. 

That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! 

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far 

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; 

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth 

In form and shape compact and beautiful. 

In will, in action free, companionship. 

And thousand other signs of 'purer life; 

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 

A power more strong in beauty, born of %is 

And fated to excel us, as we pass 

In glory thai old Darkness: nor are we 

Thereby more conquer d, than by 'us the rule 

Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil 

Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed 

[94] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

And jeedetk stilly more comely than itself? 
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? 
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove 
Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings 
To wander wherewithal and find its joys? 
We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs 
Have bared forth, not pale solitary doves. 
But eagles golden-feather' d, who do tower 
Above us in their beauty, and must reign 
In right thereof; for 't is the eternal law 
That first in beauty should be first in might: 
Yea, by that law, another race may drive 
Our conquerors to m^ourn as we do now. 
Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, 
My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face? 
Have ye beheld his chariot, foamed along 
By noble winghd creatures he hath made? 
I saw him on the calmed waters scud. 
With such a glow of beauty in his eyes. 
That it enforced me to bid sad farewell 
To all my empire; farewell sad I took. 
And hither came, to see how dolorous fate 
Had wrought upon ye; and how I might best 
Give consolation in this woe extreme. 
Receive the truth, and let it be your balm.** 

It appears, then, that the new principle of being, in 
whose advent lay the ruin of the old world, is beauty. 

" *T is the eternal law 
That first in beatdy should be first in might.** 

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THE TORCH 

This is, as you know, Keats*s distinctive mark — the 
perception and adoration of beauty. What love was to 
Shelley, that beauty was to Keats — the open door to 
divinity; he saw life as a form of beauty. And he means 
what he says — not that beauty has strength as an added 
quality, but that beauty is strength, and reigns in its own 
right. This rise of the Olympians was beauty's moment 
of birth in the minds of men ; this birth was a revelation, 
like a new religion, and it is presented as such by Keats 
in a two-fold way. First it is a revelation to the Titans. 
You have seen how Oceanus on beholding the new god 
of the sea, gave up the rule over it. So Clymene, who 
describes herself — 

" O Father y I am here the simplest voice *' — 

tells her experience: 

" / stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore. 
Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land 
Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers. 
Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief; 
Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth; 
So that I felt a movement in my heart 
To chide, and to reproach that solitude 
With songs of misery, m,usic of our woes; 
And sat me down, and took a mouthhd shell 
And murmured into it, and made melody — 
O melody no more! for while I sang, 
[96] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

And with poor skill let pass into the breeze 

The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand 

Just opposite, an island of the sea. 

There came enchantment with the shifting wind. 

That did both drown and keep alive my ears. 

I threw my shell away upon the sand. 

And a wave ftlVd it, as my sense was filVd 

With that new blissful golden melody. 

A living death was in each gush of sounds. 

Each family of rapturous hurried notes. 

That fell, one after one, yet all at once. 

Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string: 

And then another, then another strain. 

Each like a dove leaving its olive perch. 

With music winged instead of silent plumes 

To hover round my head, and make me sick 

Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame. 

And I was stopping up my frantic ears. 

When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands, 

A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune. 

And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo! 

The morning -bright Apollo! young Apollo!* 

I fled, it followed me, and cried, 'Apollo!* " 

Beauty is also a revelation to the gods themselves in 
their own bosoms where it has sprung into life. The pas- 
sage in which Apollo's awakening is described — full 
of a poet's personal touches of his own experience in 
coming into possession of himself — is one of the most 
impassioned in all Keats's writing: 

[97] 



THE TORCH 

*' Together had he left his mother fair 
And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower. 
And in the morning twilight wandered forth 
Beside the osiers of a rivulet, 
Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale. 
The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars 
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush 
Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle 
There was no covert, no retired cave 
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves. 
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. 
He listened, and he wept, and his bright tears 
Went trickling down the golden bow he held. 
Thus with half-shut suffusM eyes he stood. 
While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by 
With solemn step an awful Goddess came. 
And there was purport in her looks for him. 
Which he with eager guess began to read 
Perplexed, the while melodiously he said: 
*How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea? 
Or hath that antique mien and robhd form 
Moved in these vales invisible till now? 
Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er 
The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone 
In cool mid-forest. Surely I have traced 
The rustle of those ample skirts about 
These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers 
Lift up their heads, and still the whisper passed. 
Goddess! I have beheld those eyes before. 
And their eternal calm, and all that face 

[98] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

Or I have dream' d.* — * YeSy^ said the supreme shape y 

* Thou hast dreamed of me; and awaking up 

Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side^ 

Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast 

Unwearied ear of the whole universe 

Listened in pain and pleasure at the birth 

Of such new tuneful wonder. Is H not strange 

That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth. 

What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad 

When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs 

To one who in this lonely isle hath been 

The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life. 

From the young day when first thy infant hand 

Pluck'd witless the weak flowers, till thine arm 

Could bend that bow heroic to all times. 

Show thy hearths secret to an ancient Power 

Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones 

For prophecies of thee, and for the sake 

Of loveliness new-born.' — Apollo tlien. 

With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes. 

Thus answered, while his white melodious throat 

Throbb'd with the syllables: — * Mnemosyne! 

Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how; 

Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest? 

Why should I strive to show what from thy lips 

Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark. 

And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes: 

I strive to search wherefore I am so sad, 

Until a melancholy numbs my limbs; 

And then upon the grass I sit, and moan, 

Lor [99] 



THE TORCH 

Like one who once had wings. — why should I 

Feel cursed and thwarted, when the liegeless air 

Yields to my step aspirant? why should I 

Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet? 

Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing: 

Are there not other regions than this isle? 

What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun! 

And the most patient brilliance of the moon! 

And stars by thousands! Point me out the way 

To any one particular beauteous star. 

And I will flit into it with my lyre. 

And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss 

I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power? 

Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity 

Makes this alarum in the elements. 

While I here idle listen on the shores 

In fearless yet in aching ignorance? 

O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp. 

That waileth every morn and eventide. 

Tell me why thus I rave, about these groves! 

Mute thou remainest. — Mute! yet I can read 

A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: 

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. 

Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellious. 

Majesties, sovran voices, agonies. 

Creations and destroyings, all at once 

Pour into the wide hollows of my brain. 

And deify me, as if some blithe wine 

Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk. 

And so become immortal.^ — Thus the God, 

[100] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

While his enkindled eyes, with level glance 

Beneath his white soft temples, steadfast kept 

Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne. 

Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush 

All the immortal fairness of his limbs: 

Most like the struggle at the gate of death; 

Or liker still to one who should take leave 

Of pale immortal death, and with a pang 

As hot as death '5 is chill, with fierce convulse 

Die into life: so young Apollo anguished: 

His very hair, his golden tresses famed 

Kept undulation round his eager neck. 

During the pain Mnemosyne upheld 

Her arms as one who prophesied. — At length 

Apollo shriek'd; — and lo! from all his limbs 

Celestial. . . ." 

The birth-cry of Apollo was the death-cry of Keats: 
there the golden pen fell from his hands, and the poem 
— a fragment — ends. 

There is one detail in Keats's work, which though it is 
subsidiary, deserves mention because it completes the 
reality of the Titan Myth in an important way. In all the 
other writers, whom I have named, you do not get any 
idea of the Titans physically, you do not see them as Ti- 
tans. In Shelley, and the rest, Prometheus is essentially a 
man; he has human proportion; in Keats Prometheus 
does not appear at all. But Keats has realized the Ti- 
tanic figures to the imagination as distinct and noble 

[101] 



THE TORCH 
forms ; they have the massiveness of limb and immobil- 
ity of feature that we associate with Egyptian art, with 
the Sphinxes and the Memnons ; yet each is character- 
ized differently; Saturn, Oceanus, Enceladus, Thea, 
Mnemosyne are individualized, and especially Hype- 
rion is set forth, in ways of grandeur. The subject would 
require more illustration than I can now give it ; but let 
me cite the very remarkable figure which is found in the 
second version of " Hyperion," a version that is as full of 
Dante as the first one is of Milton. The figure is that of 
Moneta, the soUtary and ageless priestess of the temple 
of the Titans, " sole goddess of its desolation," who gives 
the poet the vision of the past. 

" And yet I had a terror of her robes. 
And chiefly of the veils that from her brow 
Hung pahy and curtained her in mysteries. 
That made my heart too small to hold its blood. 
This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand 
Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face. 
Not jyin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd 
By an immortal sickness which kills not; 
It works a constant change, which happy death 
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing 
To no death was that visage; it had past 
The lily and the snow; and beyond these 
I must not think now, though I saw that face. 
But for her eyes I should have fled away; 
[102] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

They held me hack with a benignant lights 

Soft, mitigated by divinest lids 

Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed 

Of all external things; they saw me not, 

But in blank splendour beamed, like the mild moon. 

Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not 

What eyes are upward cast.'' 

A similar imaginative power to that shown here per- 
vades Keats 's conceptions of the Titans, and distin- 
guishes his work from all others as a creation in the vis- 
ible world of the imagination such as is not elsewhere to 
be found. Here only is the Titan world made nobly real. 
I fear to weary you with this long catalogue of the va- 
rious modem forms of the Titan Myth, but it is neces- 
sary to develop the theme. I must say at least a word 
about Goethe's "Prometheus." It is only a brief frag- 
ment of a drama, and belongs to his youth. He was but 
twenty -four when he experimented with it. In the scenes 
which we possess, Prometheus is the maker of the clay 
images to which he gives life by the aid of Pallas — that 
is, really, by his own intelligence. He launches them as 
men in the career of civilization by declaring to them the 
principle of property ; he tells one to build a house, and 
to the question whether it will be for the man himself or 
for everybody, Prometheus answers it shall be the man's 
own private possession and dwelling; he declares also 

[103] 



THE TORCH 

the principle of retaliatory justice, saying on the occa- 
sion of the first theft, that he whose hand is against every 
one, every one's hand shall be against him; and he an- 
nounces the fact and meaning of the first death. The 
drama does not proceed further. Its significance Hes in 
two points ; in the first place it is easy to see in Prome- 
theus's attitude toward his clay images and his lan- 
guage about them a reflection of the young poet's own 
state of mind toward the mental beings whom he creates 
— a reflection, that is, of the pride and glory of genius in 
imaginary creation. Secondly, and more importantly, 
the drama exhibits the intense desire of the young Goe- 
the for complete individual independence. In the answer 
Prometheus makes to the messenger of Zeus, who re- 
monstrates with him, the central point is that Prome- 
theus feels he is a god Hke Zeus, and wants freedom to 
do his will in his own realm as Zeus does in Olympus. 
Let Zeus keep his own, and let me keep my own, he 
says ; he would rather his clay images should never live 
than be subjects of Zeus, for being still unborn, they are 
still free; liberty is the true good, and men, made by him, 
shall be embodiments of his own independent spirit. In 
all this is the prophecy of Goethe's own life. To me Goe- 
the is the type of the man who wants to be let alone ; and 
he accomplished his desire in a supremely selfish tran- 
quillity, in which he used life to develop himself, 

[104] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

sacrificed all things to himself, was at once the model 
and the condemnation of self-culture so pursued. In his 
young Prometheus there is this impatient cry for indi- 
vidual liberty, as a basis of life; and I discern little else 
significant in it. I must also spare a word for Victor 
Hugo's "Titan." The poem is in the "Legend of the 
Ages." This Titan is not Prometheus, or any other in- 
dividual Titan, but is all of them in one, the giant, con- 
ceived as one. He is, of course, mankind — earth-born 
man, conceived as in scientific history, burrowing his 
way out of the planet itself — a massive mediaeval crea- 
ture, gross and violent, tearing his path through cave 
and grotto, till at last he emerges and sees the stars. This 
giant is clearly a symbol of man rising from his crude 
earthliness of nature and barbaric ages up to the sight 
and knowledge of the heavenly world. It is a type of pro- 
gress, as science and history jointly conceive the evolu- 
tion of humanity. 

I have sufficiently illustrated how the Titan Myth in 
its variety has been employed to embody and express the 
idea of a progressive humanity in many aspects as it has 
appeared to different poets. The idea of progress is in 
our civilization a continuing and universal idea; and 
Prometheus is a continuing and universal image of its 
nature — the race-image of a race-idea. The Prome- 
thean situation is inherent in the law of human progress, 

[105] 



THE TORCH 
however viewed, whether historically or scientifically or 
ethically, or in any other way. Emerson says 

" The fiend that man harries^ 
Is Love of the Best.'* 

The dream of this Best, and the will to bring it down to 
earth — the struggle with the temporary ruKng worse 
that is in the world and must be dethroned — the proud 
and resolute suffering of all that such a present world 
can inflict — the faith in the final victory, are the Pro- 
methean characteristics; but the human spirit, in the 
nature of the case, must forever be in bonds ; its succes- 
sive Hberations are partial only, and in the disclosure of 
a forever fairer dream in the future, hes also the dis- 
closure of new bonds, for the present is always a state of 
chains in view of the to-morrow; and for man there is 
always to-morrow. The great words that seem the keys 
of progress, such as reason, love, beauty, are only sym- 
bols of an infinite series in life — a series that never ends. 
Such is the abstract statement that progress involves the 
idea of humanity as a Promethean sufferer. But the race, 
which requires picturesque and vivid images of its high- 
est faith, hope and thought, comes to its poets, Hke the 
human child, and says ever and ever — " Tell me a stoiy : 
tell me a story about myself." And the poet tells the race 
a new story about itself — Hke the mother of Marius 

[106] 



THE TITAN MYTH 

when she told him of "the white bird which he must 
bear in his bosom across the crowded market-place — 
his soul." Each poet tells this new story to the child 
about itself — a story it did not know before, and the 
child beHeves the story and increases knowledge and life 
with it. The question the race asks, in this Myth, is 
" what is most divine in me "^ " " What is the god in me ? " 
— and Shelley answers, it is all-enduring and all-for- 
giving love toward all; and Herder answers that it is rea- 
son, Keats that it is beauty, Goethe that it is Hberty, and 
Hugo that it is immense triumphant toil; and each in 
giving his answer tells the story of the old gods and the 
younger gods, and the wise Titan who knew yet other 
gods that should come. And the race listens to these tales 
because it hears in them its own voice speaking. Men of 
genius are men, like other men; but their genius, if I 
may use an obvious comparison, is like the reflector in 
front of the light-house flame — in all directions but one 
it is a common flame, but in that one direction along 
which the reflector magnifies, glorifies and speeds its 
radiance, it is the shining of a great fight. Look at men 
of genius, as you find them in biography, and they seem 
ordinary persons of daily affairs; but if you can catch 
sight of genius through that side which is turned out to 
the infinite as to a great ocean, you will see, I will not 
say the man himself, but the use God makes of the man. 

[107] 



THE TORCH 
That use is to reveal ourselves to ourselves, to show what 
human nature is and can do, to unlock our minds, our 
hearts, all our energies, for use. We admire and love 
such men because they are more ourselves than we are, 
the undeveloped, often unknown selves that in us are 
but partially bom. " What is most divine in me ? " is the 
question the race puts; and perhaps it is true (though 
the statement may be startHng), that as soon as man dis- 
covers a god in himself, all external gods fall from their 
thrones — and this is the meaning of the myth. But 
again, what is this but the old verse — 

*' The kingdom of heaven is within you?'* 

That realized, the old gods may go their ways. It is 
reahzed, perhaps, for one of its modes, in this way: 
that as the being of beauty is entire and perfect in 
the grass that flourishes for a summer, or in the rose 
of dawn that fades even while it blossoms, so the power 
of moral ideas enters, entire and perfect, into our 
being, and, as I said, the humblest of men suffering for 
man's good as he conceives it shares in the moral sub- 
limity of Prometheus. What is thus within man — the 
thing that is most divine — is certainly the medium by 
which man approaches the divinity, and through which 
he beholds it, in any hving way. It belongs to Puritan- 
ism, as a mood of mind, to be impatient of any external 

[108] 



THE TITAN MYTH 
thing between the soul and the divinity ; it will have the 
least of any such material element in its spiritual sight 
and communion ; it sees god by an inner vision. Mediums 
of some sort there must be between human nature and 
its idea of the divine ; and it seems to me that our inner 
vision by which the Puritan spirit reaches outward and 
upward is the vision of imagination transfiguring history 
to saints and martyrs in their holy living and holy dying, 
transfiguring all human experience to the idealities of 
poetry. Mankind seeing itself more perfect in St. Fran- 
cis, in Philip Sidney, in all men of spiritual genius, 
makes them a part of this inner vision — and, rank over 
rank, above them the perfection of Arthur and Parsifal, 
and still more high the perfection of reason, beauty, and 
love in their element. In this hierarchy of human daring, 
dreaming, desiring is the only beatific vision that human 
eyes ever immediately beheld — the vision of what is 
most divine in man. What I maintain is that, humanly 
speaking, in the search for God one path by which the 
race moves on is through this inner vision of ideal per- 
fections in its own nature and its own experience, which 
it has fixed and illuminated in these imaginative figures, 
these race-images of race-ideas. 



[109] 



The Torch 

V 



SPENSER 



The general principle which I have endeavoured to set 
forth in the first four lectures is that mankind in the 
process of civilization stores up race-power, in one or an- 
other form, so that it is a continually growing fund : and 
that literature, pre-eminently, is such a store of spiritual 
race-power, derived originally from the historical Hfe or 
from the general experience of men, and transformed by 
imagination so that all which is not necessary falls away 
from it and what is left is truth in its simplest, most vivid 
and vital form. Thus I instanced mythology, chivalry, 
and the Scriptures as three such sifted deposits of the 
past ; and I illustrated the use poetry makes of such race- 
images and race-ideas by the example of the myth of the 
Titans. In the remaining four lectures I desire to ap- 
proach the same general principle of the storing of race- 
power from the starting-point of the individual author 
— to set forth Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Shel- 

[113] 



THE TORCH 

ley, not in their personality but as race-exponents, and 
to show that their essential greatness and value are due 
to the degree in which they availed themselves of the 
race-store. You may remember that I defined education 
for all men as the process of identifying oneself with the 
race-mind, entering into and taking possession of the 
race-store; and the rule is the same for men of genius as 
for other men. You find, consequently, that the greatest 
poets have always been the best scholars of their times 
— not in the encyclopaedic sense that they knew every- 
thing, but in the sense that they possessed the living 
knowledge of their age, so far as it concerns the human 
soul and its history. They have always possessed what is 
called the academic mind — that is, they had a strong 
grasp on literary tradition and the great thoughts of 
mankind, and the great forms which those thoughts had 
taken on in the historic imagination. Virgil is a striking 
example of such a poet, perfectly cultivated in all the ar- 
tistic, philosophic, literary tradition as it then was: 
Dante and Chaucer are similar instances; and, in Eng- 
lish, Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley and Tennyson con- 
tinue the line of those poets in whom scholarship — the 
academic tradition — is an essential element in their 
worth. It ought not to be necessary to bring this out so 
clearly; for it is obvious that men of genius, in the pro- 
cess of absorbing the race-store, by the very fact become 

[114] 



SPENSER 

scholarly men, men of intellectual culture, though in 
consequence of their genius they neglect all culture ex- 
cept that which still has spiritual life in it. This is so ele- 
mentary a truth in literature that the index to the im- 
portance of an author is often his representative power 
— the degree to which he sums up and delivers the hu- 
man past. How large a tract of time, what extent of 
knowledge, what range of historical emotion — does his 
mind drain ? These are initial questions. And in literary 
history, you know, there are here and there minds, so 
central to the period, such meeting points of different 
ages and cultures, that they resemble those junctions on 
a railway map which seem to absorb all geography into 
their own black dots. The greatest poets are just such 
centres of spiritual history; where ancient and modem 
meet, where classicism and medisevalism, Christianity 
and paganism. Renaissance and Reformation and Rev- 
olution meet — there is the focus, for the time being, of 
the soul of man ; and it is at that point that genius devel- 
opes its transcendent power. 

Spenser was such a mind. I spoke in the first lecture 
of that law of progress which involves the passing away 
of a civilization at the moment of its perfection and the 
death of that breed of men who have brought it to its 
height. Spenser was the poet of a dying race and a dying 
culture; in his work there is reflected and embodied a 

[115] 



THE TORCH 

climax in the spiritual life of humanity to which imag- 
nation gives form, beauty, and passion. In this respect 
I am always reminded of Virgil when I read him; for 
Virgil used, like Spenser, the romanticism of a receding 
past to express his sense of human life, and he was re- 
lated to his materials in much the same way. The Myth 
of Arthur lay behind Spenser as the Myth of Troy lay 
behind Virgil in the mist of his country's origins; the 
Italians of the Renaissance, Ariosto, and Tasso, were a 
school for Spenser much as the Alexandrian poets had 
been for Virgil ; and as in Virgil mythology and Homeric 
heroism and the. legend of the antique Italian land be- 
fore Rome blended in one, and became the last flower- 
ing of the pre-Christian world in what is, perhaps, the 
greatest of all world-poems, the " ^Eneid, " so in Spenser 
chivalry, medisevalism and the new birth of learning in 
Europe blended, and gave us a world-poem of the 
Christian soul, in which mediaeval spirituality — as it 
seems to me — expired. Spenser resembled Virgil, too, 
in his moment; he was endeavouring to create for Eng- 
land a poem such as Italy possessed in Ariosto's and 
Tasso's epics, to introduce into his country's literature 
the most supreme poetic art then in the world, just as Vir- 
gil was attempting to instil into the Roman genius the im- 
aginative art of Greece. He resembled Virgil again in his 
poetic education inasmuch as he formed his powers and 

[116] 



SPENSER 

first exercised them in pastoral verse, in the ' ' Shephard's 
Kalendar" as Virgil did in his "Eclogues"; and he re- 
sembled Virgil still more importantly in that his theme 
was the greatest known to him — namely, the empire of 
the soul, as Virgil's was the empire of Rome. Spenser, 
then, when he came to his work is to be looked on as a 
master of all literary learning, a pioneer and planter of 
poetic art in his own country, and a poet who used the 
world of the receding past as his means of expressing 
what was most real to him in human life. 

The work by which he is remembered is " The Faerie 
Queene, " and in it all that I have said meets you at the 
threshold. Perhaps the first, and certainly the abiding 
impression the poem makes, is of its remoteness from 
life. Remoteness, you know, is said to be a necessary 
element in any artistic effect — such as you feel in look- 
ing at Greek statues or Italian Madonnas or French 
landscapes. This remoteness of the artistic world the 
poem has, in large measure: its country is no physical 
region known to geography, but is that land of the plain 
where Knights are always pricking, of forests and streams 
and hills that have no element of composition, and es- 
pecially of a horizon like the sea's, usually lonely, but 
where anything may appear at any time : it is a land like 
a dream; and what takes place there at any moment is 
pictorial, and can be painted. But the quality of re- 

[117] 



THE TORCH 

moteness, so noticeable in the poem and to which I re- 
fer, is not that of artistic atmosphere and setting. It 
arises largely from the remoteness of history in the poem, 
felt in the constant presence of outworn things, of by- 
gone characters, ways and incidents; and the im- 
pression of intricacy that the poem also makes at first, 
the sense of confusion in it, is partly due to this same 
presence of the unfamiliar in most heterogeneous variety. 
This miscellaneousness is the result of Spenser's com- 
prehensive inclusion in the poem of all he knew, that is, 
of the entire literary tradition of the race within his 
ken. Thus you find, at the outset, Aristotle's scheme of 
the moral virtues, and Plato's doctrine of the unity of 
beauty and wisdom, on the philosophical side; and for 
imagery out of the classics, here are Plato, Proserpina, 
and Night, the house of Morpheus, the bleeding tree, 
the cloud that envelopes the fallen warrior and allows 
him to escape, the journey in Hades, the story of " Hip- 
polytus, " and fauns, satyrs and other minor mythologi- 
cal beings. You find, also, out of mediaeval things, the 
method of the poem which is the characteristic mediaeval 
method of allegory, and in imagery dragons, giants, 
dwarfs, the hermit, the magician, the dungeon, the wood 
of error, the dream of Arthur, the holy wells, the Sara- 
cen Knights, the House of Pride, the House of Holi- 
ness, and many more; and, in these lists, I have cited 

[118] 



SPENSER 

instances only from the first of the six books. A similar 
rich variety of matter is to be found, consisting of the 
characteristic belongings of Renaissance fable. This 
multiplicity of imaginative detail, being as it is a sum- 
mary of all the poetical knowledge of previous time, is 
perplexing to a reader unfamiliar with the literature 
before Spenser, and makes the poem seem really, and not 
merely artistically remote. Here appears most clearly the 
fact which I emphasize, that the *' Faerie Queene " depicts 
and contains a receding worid, a dying culture; for it is 
to be borne in mind that to Spenser and his eariy readers 
these things were not then so remote; medisevalism was 
as near to him as Puritanism is to us, and the thoughts, 
methods, aims, language and imagery of the Renaissance 
as near as the Revolution is to us. In that age, too, 
chivalry yet lingered, at least as a spectacle, and other 
materials in the poem that now seem to us like stage- 
machinery were part a-nd parcel of real life. The tourney 
was still a game of splendid pleasure and display at the 
Court of Elizabeth; the masque-procession, so constant 
in one or another form in the poem, was a fashion of 
Christmas mummery, of the Court Masque, and of 
city processions ; the physical aspect and furniture of the 
poem were, thus, not wholly antiquated; and on the 
side of character, it is easy to read between the lines the 
presence of Spenser's own noble friends — and no one 

[119] 



THE TORCH 

in that age was richer in noble friendship — the pres- 
ence, I mean, of the just Lord Grey, the adventurous 
Raleigh, and the high-spirited Philip Sidney. The ele- 
ment of historical remoteness must, therefore, be 
thought of as originally much less strong than now, and 
one which the passage of time has imported into the 
poem very largely. 

We are, perhaps, too apt to think that our own age is 
one in which great heterogeneousness of knowledge, 
of thought and principle and faith, is a distinctive trait; 
but we are not the first to find our race-inheritance a 
confusion of riches, and a tentative electicism the best 
we can compass in getting a philosophy of our own. 
Every learned and open mind, in the times of the flowing 
together of the world's ideas, has the same experience. 
Spenser, being a receptive mind and standing at the 
centre of the ideas of the world then, was necessarily 
overwhelmed with the variety of his knowledge; but he 
faced the same problem that Mlton, Gray, Shelley, and 
Tennyson in their time met ; the problem of how to re- 
duce this miscellaneousness of matter to some order, to 
reconcile it with his own mind, to build up out of it his 
own world. It is the same problem that confronts each 
one of us, in education; in the presence of this race- 
inheritance, so vast, so apparently contradictory and 
diverse — how to take possession of it, to make it ours 

[120] 



SPENSER 

vitally, to have it enter into and take possession of us. 
Spenser is an admirable example of this situation, for in 
his poem the opposition between the race-mind and the 
individual is clearly brought out in the point that he con- 
verges all this imagery, knowledge and method in 
order to set forth the individual's life. Spenser states his 
purpose in the preface: "The general end," he says, 
"of all the Book is to fashion a gentleman, or noble 
person, in vertuous and gentle disci pHne. " It is the very 
problem before each of us in education: "to fashion a 
gentleman. " Spenser's plan, in portraying how this is to 
be done, is a very simple one. By a gentleman he 
means a man of Christian virtue, perfected in all the 
graces and the powers of human nature. The educa- 
tion required is an education in the development of 
the virtues, as he named them — Holiness, Temper- 
ance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy; he illus- 
trates the development of each virtue, one in each Knight, 
and sends each Knight forth on an adventure in the 
course of which the Knight meets and overcomes the 
characteristic temptations of the virtue which he em- 
bodies. This was the plan of the poem, which, however, 
the poet found it easier to formulate than to follow with 
precision. The main fact stands out, however, that Spen- 
ser used all his resources of knowledge and art, miscel- 
laneous as they were, for the single purpose of showing 

[121] 



THE TORCH 

how the soul comes to moral perfection in the Christian 
worid. You see there is nothing contemporary or remote 
or by -gone in the problem: that is universal and un- 
changing ; but in answering it Spenser used an imagin- 
ative language that to many of us is like a lost tongue. 
Shall we, then, let the allegory go, as Lowell advised, 
content that it does not bite us, as he says ? I cannot 
bring myself to second that advice. Though I am as 
fond of the idols of poetry for their own sake as any one, 
yet I have room for idols of morality and philosophy 
also — let us have as many idols as we can get, is my 
way: and to leave out of our serious-minded Spenser 
what was to the poet himself the core of his meaning — 
its spirituahty — is too violent a measure, and bespeaks 
such desperate dullness in the allegory as I do not find 
in it. To read the poem for the beauty of its surface, and 
to let the noble substance go, is, at all events, not the way 
to understand it as a focus of race-elements and a store 
of race-power, as a poem not of momentary dehght, but 
of historical phases of knowledge, culture and aspira- 
tion, a poem of the thoughtful human spirit brooding 
over its long inheritance of beauty, honour, and virtue. 

Of course, I cannot in an hour convey much of an 
idea of so great a poem, so various in its loveUness, so 
profound in significance, so diversified in merely Kterary 
interest. I shall make no attempt to tell its picturesque 

[122] 



SPENSER 

and wandering story, to describe its characters, or to ex- 
plain what marvellous lives they led in that old world of 
romance. But I shall try to show, in general terms, cer- 
tain aspects of it as a poem that presents life in a uni- 
versal, vital, and never-to-be-antiquated way, such as it 
seemed to one of the most noble-natured of English- 
men, in a great age of human effort, thought and ac- 
complishment. 

Among the primary images under which life has been 
figured, none is more universal and constant than that 
into which the idea of travel enters. To all men at all 
times hfe has been a voyage, a pilgrimage, a quest. 
Spenser conceived of it as the quest, the peculiar image 
of chivalry, but not as the quest for the Grail or any 
other shadowy symbol on the attainment of which the 
quest was ended in a mystic solution. The quest of his 
Knights is for self-mastery; and it is achieved at each 
forward step of the journey. You remember that in the 
lecture on Prometheus I illustrated the way in which 
man takes a certain part of his nature — the evil prin- 
ciple — and places it outside of himself, calls it Mephis- 
topheles, and so deals with it artistically ; in Spenser, the 
temptation which each Knight is under is his worser 
self, as we say, so taken and placed outside as his enemy 
whom he overcomes; thus, Guy on, the Knight of tem- 
perance, overcomes the various forms of anger, of 

[123] 



THE TORCH 

avarice, and of voluptuousness, which are merely, in 
fact, his other and worser selves; in each victory he 
gathers strength for the next encounter, and so ends 
perfecting himself in that virtue. Life — that is to say, 
the quest — has a goal in self-mastery, that is progres- 
sively reached by the Knight at each new stage of his 
struggle. The atmosphere of Hfe — so conceived as a 
spiritual warfare — is broadly rendered; it is, for ex- 
ample, always a thing of danger, and this element is 
given through the changing incident, the deceits prac- 
tised on the Knights, the troubles they fall into, often 
unwittingly, and undeservedly, their constant need to be 
vigilant and to receive succor. The secret, the false, the 
insidious, are as often present as is the warfare of the 
open foe. Again, this life is a thing of mystery. However 
clear we may try to make life, however positive in mind 
we are and armed against illusions, it still remains true 
that mystery envelopes life. I do not mean the mystery 
of thought, of the unknown, but the mystery of life itself. 
Spenser conceives this mystery as the action, friendly or 
inimical, of a spiritual world round about man, a su- 
pernatural world ; and he renders it by means of enchant- 
ment. I dare say that to most readers the presence of en- 
chantment, both evil and good, is a hindrance to the ap- 
preciation of the poem and impairs its reality to their 
minds. Arthur, you know, has a veiled shield; but its 

[124] 



SPENSER 

bared radiance will overthrow of itself any foe. This 
seems like an unfair advantage, and takes interest from 
the poem. Such enchanted weapons may be regarded as 
symbolic of the higher nature of the cause in which they 
are employed, of its inward power, and possibly of the 
true powers of the heroes, their spiritual force, and it may 
be that this emphasis on the spirituality of their force is 
the true reason for the introduction of the symbol; for 
these are not only Knights human, but Knights Chris- 
tian and clothed with a might which is not of this world. 
Such an explanation, though plausible, seems mechani- 
cal; the truth which it contains is that the enchanted 
arms do not denote a higher degree of physical strength, 
as if the Knights had rifles instead of spears, but a dif- 
ference of spiritual power. It is, however, much more 
clear that by the realm of enchantment in the poem is 
figured the interest which the supernatural world takes 
in man's conflict — the mediaeval idea that God and his 
angels are on one side and the devil and his angels are 
on the other; and the presence of enchantment in the 
poem is a means of expressing this belief. The reality of 
divine aid against devilish machination is thus sym- 
bolized; but in one particular this aid is so important a 
matter that Spenser introduces it in a more essential and, 
in fact, in a human way. To Spenser's mind, no man 
could save himself, or perfect himself in virtue even, 

[125] 



THE TORCH 
without Divine Grace; this was the doctrine he held, 
and, therefore, he made Arthur the special repre- 
sentative and instrument of Grace, and at each point of 
the story where the Knight cannot retrieve him- 
self from the danger into which he had fallen, Arthur 
appears with his glorious arms for the rescue. The pres- 
ence of mystery in life, too, is not only thus felt in the 
atmosphere of enchantment and in the signal acts of res- 
cue by Arthur, but it also envelopes the cardinal ab- 
stract ideas of the poem — such ideas, I mean, as wis- 
dom in Una, and as chastity in Britomart, to whose 
beauty (which is of course, the imaging forth of the 
special virtue of each) is ascribed a miraculous power of 
mastery, as in Una's case over the Lion and the foresters, 
and in Britomart's case over Artegal. 

" And he himselfe long gazing there upon. 
At last fell humbly downe upon his knee. 
And of his wonder made religion, 

Weening some heavenly goddesse he did see.^* 

This is that radiance which Plato first saw in the counte- 
nance of Truth, such that, he said, were Truth to come 
among men unveiled in her own form, all men would 
worship her. So Spenser, learning from Plato, presents 
the essential loveliness of all virtue as having inherent 
power to overcome — precisely, you will remember, as 

[126] 



SPENSER 

Keats describes the principle of beauty in " Hyperion " 
as inherently victorious. 

The idea of life as a quest, with an atmosphere of 
danger and mystery, and presided over by great princi- 
ples such as wisdom, grace, chastity, so clad in loveliness 
to the moral sense that they seem like secondary forms 
of Divine being — these are fundamental conceptions 
in the poem, its roots, so to speak, and they belong in 
the ethical sphere. But Spenser was the most poetically 
minded of all English poets; he not only knew that 
however true and exalted his ideas of life might be, they 
must come forth from his mind as images, but he also by 
nature loved truth in the image more than in the ab- 
stract; and he therefore approached truth through the 
imagination rather than through the intellect. That is to 
say, he was a poet, first and foremost; and wove his 
poem of sensuous effects. Sensibility to all things of sense 
was his primary endowment; he was a lover of beauty, 
of joy, and his joy in beauty reached such a pitch that he 
excels all English poets in a certain artistic voluptu- 
ousness of nature, which was less rich in Milton and less 
pure in Keats, who alone are to be compared with him, 
as poets of sensuous endowment. It is seldom that the 
artistic nature appears in the English race; it belongs 
rather to the southern peoples, and especially to Italy; 
but when it does arise in the English genius, and blends 

[ 127 ] 



THE TORCH 
happily there with the high moral spirit which is a more 
constant English trait — especially when it blends with 
the Puritan strain, it seems as if the young Plato had 
been born again. Both Milton and Spenser were Puri- 
tans who were lovers of beauty; and Spenser showed 
Milton that way of grace. No language can exaggerate 
the extent to which Spenser was permeated with this sen- 
suousness of temperament, and he created the body of 
his poem out of it — the colour, the picture, the incident, 
figures and places, the atmosphere, the cadence and the 
melody of it. You feel this bodily delight in the very fall 
of the lines, interlacing and sinuous, with Italian soft- 
ness, smoothness, and slide. You feel it in his love of 
gardens and streams; in his love of pictured walls, and 
all the characteristic adornments of Renaissance art; in 
his grouping of human figures in the various forms of the 
masque; in his descriptions of wealth and luxury, of the 
bower of bliss, of the scenes of mythology; in every part 
of the poem the flowing of this fount of beauty is the one 
unfailing thing. It came to him from the Italian Renais- 
sance, of course. It is the Renaissance element in the 
poem; and with it all the other elements are suffused. 
The worship of beauty, as it was known in all objects 
of art, and in all poetry which had formed itself, in de- 
scription and motive, on objects of art, was perhaps its 
centre; but, in Spenser, it exceeded such bounds, and, 

[128] 



SPENSER 

though taken from the Renaissance, it was given a new 
career in Puritanism. For the singular thing about this 
sensuous sensibihty in Spenser, this artistic voluptu- 
ousness in the sight and presence of beauty, is that it 
remained pure in spirit. In Renaissance poetry, using 
the same chivalric tradition as Spenser, this spirit has 
ended in Ariosto's " Orlando " — a poem of cynicism, as 
it seems to me. It is to the honour of the moral genius of 
the English that the Renaissance spirit in poetry, in their 
tongue, issued in so nobly different a poem as "The 
Faerie Queene. " This was because, as I say, the Renais- 
sance worship of beauty was given a new career by Spenser 
in Puritanism. Perhaps I can best illustrate the matter 
by bringing forward what was one of Spenser's noblest 
points. He raised this worship of beauty to the highest 
point of ideality by having recourse to the tradition of 
chivalry in its worship of woman, and blended the two 
in a new worship of womanhood. I think it will be agreed 
that, although Spenser's romance is primarily one of 
the adventures of men, it is his female characters that 
live most vividly in the memory of the reader. These 
characters are, indeed, very simple and elementary ones ; 
they are not elaborated on the scale to which the novel 
has accustomed our minds; but they are of the same 
kind, it seems to me, as Shakspere's equally simple 
types of womanhood — such as Cordelia, Imogen, ]\Ii- 

[129] 



THE TORCH 

randa — of which they were prophetic. What I desire to 
bring out, however, is not their simpHcity, but the fact 
that they enter the poem to ennoble it, to raise it in 
spiritual power, and to strengthen the heroes in their 
struggles. In this respect, as I think, Spenser did a new 
thing. In the epic, generally, woman comes on the scene 
only to impair the moral quality and the manly actions of 
the hero : such was Dido, you remember, in the "iEneid," 
and Eve in " Paradise Lost, " and the same story, with 
shght quahfications holds of other epic poems. It is a 
high distinction that in Spenser womanhood is presented, 
not as the source of evil, its presence and its temptation, 
but as the inspiration to hfe for such Knights as Artegal, 
the Red-Cross Knight, and others; and, furthermore, 
the worship of beauty, which they found in the worship of 
womanhood, is in Spenser hardly to be distinguished 
from the worship of those principles, which I have de- 
scribed as secondary forms of Divine being — the prin- 
ciples of wisdom, chastity and the Uke. I find in these 
idealities of womanhood the highest reach of the poem, 
and in them blend harmoniously the chivalric, artistic 
and moral elements of Spenser's mind. And as we feel in 
Spenser's men the near presence of such friends as Lord 
Grey, Raleigh and Sidney, it is not fanciful to feel here 
the neighbourhood of Elizabethan women — such as 
she of whom Jonson wrote the great epitaph : 

[130] 



SPENSER 

** Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse; 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. 
Death, ere thou hast slain another 
Learned and fair and good as she. 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. '* 

With this supreme presence of womanhood in "The 
Faerie Queene " goes the fact that warfare as such is a 
disappearing element; it is less prominent, and it inter- 
ests less, than might be expected. This is because, just 
as beauty in all its forms is spiritualized in the poem, so 
is war; the war here described is the inner warfare of the 
soul with itself; it is all a symbol of spiritual struggle, 
and necessarily it seems less real as a thing of outward 
event. The poem is one of thought, essentially; its ac- 
tion has to be interpreted in terms of thought before it is 
understood; it is, in truth, a contemplative poem, and 
its mood is as often the artistic contemplation of beauty, 
as the ethical contemplation of action. These are the two 
poles on which the poem moves. Yet they are opposed 
only in the analysis, and to our eyes; in Spenser's poem, 
and in his heart they were closely united, for virtue 
was to him the utmost of beauty, and its attainment 
was by the worship of beauty; so near, by certain 
aptitudes of emotion towards the supreme good, 
did he come to Plato, his teacher, and is therefore 

[131] 



THE TORCH 

to be fitly described, in this regard, as the disciple 
of Plato. 

I wonder whether, as I have been speaking, the poem 
and its author grow more or less remote to you. Spenser 
— this philosophical Platonist, this Renaissance artist, 
this Puritan morahst — does he seem more or less cred- 
ible ^ Was it not a strange thing that he should think that 
the abstract development of a Christian soul, however 
picturesquely presented, was an important theme of 
poetry ? Yet it is true, that the most purely poetical of 
Enghsh poets, and one of the most cultivated minds of 
Europe in his time, had this idea; and in Ehzabeth's 
reign — that is, in a period of worldly and masculine ac- 
tivity, of immense vigour, in the very dawn and sun- 
burst of an England to which our American imperial 
dream is but a toy of fancy — in that Elizabethan, that 
Shaksperian age, Spenser chose as the theme of highest 
moment the formation of a Christian character. I have 
spoken of the artistic remoteness of his poem, and of the 
remoteness of his hterary tradition, its classical, me- 
diaeval and Renaissance matter and method ; but there is 
a third remoteness by which it seems yet more distant — 
the remoteness of its spirituahty. In the days about and 
before Spenser there was great interest in the question 
of character in the upper classes; what were the quali- 
ties of a courtier was debated over and over in every civ- 

[132] 



SPENSER 

ilized country, and the books written about it are still 
famous books and worth reading. Spenser took this 
Renaissance idea — what is the pattern of manhood ? 
— and — just as in the case of the worship of beauty — 
gave it a career in Puritanism. The question became — 
what is a Christian soul, perfected in human experience ? 
What are its aims, its means, its natural history ? What 
is its ideal life in this world of beauty, honour, service ? 
And this question he debated in the six books of his half- 
completed poem, which has made him known ever since 
as the poet's poet. The Knight of the'* Faerie Queene" is 
the Renaissance courtier Christianized — that is all. 
Here is the final spiritualization of the long result of 
chivalry as an ideal of manly Ufe. That is the curious 
thing — that the result is, not merely moral, but spirit- 
ual. 

The spiritual life, in this sense, is far removed from 
our literature; it is so, because it is far removed from the 
general thought of men. The struggle men now think of 
as universal and typical of life, is not the clashing of 
spear and shield on any field of tourney, nor the fencing 
of the soul with any supernatural foe, seeking its dam- 
nation: it is the mere struggle for existence, with the 
survival of the fittest as the result : a scientific idea, and 
one that centres attention on the things of this world. 
This increases the sense in mankind of the materialism 

[133] 



THE TORCH 

of human life and the importance of its mortal interests. 
Commerce seconds science in defining this struggle as a 
competition of trade, a conflict, on the larger scale, of 
tariff wars, a race for special privilege and open oppor- 
tunity in new countries. Science and trade are almost 
as large a part of life now as righteousness was in Mat- 
thew Arnold's day: he reckoned it, I believe, at three- 
quarters. The result is that mankind is surrounded with 
a different scheme of thought, meditation and effort 
from that of Spenser's age. He was near the ages, that we 
call the ages of faith : he was not far from the old Catho- 
lic idea of discipline; he was not enfranchised from su- 
pernaturalism in Reformation dogmas; he lived when 
men still died for their religion ; — all of which is to say 
that the idea of the spiritual in man's life and its im- 
portance, was nigh and close to him. In our literature 
there is much presentation of moral character, in the 
sense of the side that a man turns toward his fellow 
beings in society: in Scott, Thackeray and in Dickens, 
George Eliot — to name the greatest, this is found ; but 
such spiritual character as Spenser made the subject 
of his meditation and picturing is not found. In the his- 
tory of literature, the hero of action has always ended by 
developing into the saintly ideal : so it was in Paganism 
from Achilles to ^Eneas ; so it was in medisevalism from 
Roland and Lancelot to Arthur, Galahad and Parsifal; 

[134] 



SPENSER 
and in this chivalric tradition Spenser is the last term. 
Will our moral ideal, as it is now flourishing, show a 
similar course — has our literature of the democratic 
movement, now in its early stages, the making of such a 
saint in it — that is, of the man to whom God only is 
real ? — as Paganism and medisevalism in their day 
evolved ? 

Spenser, then, being so remote from us, in all ways — 
the question is natural, why read his poem at all ? Be- 
cause it is the flower of long ages : because you command 
in it as in a panorama the poetical tradition of all the 
great imaginative literature in previous centuries, classi- 
cal, mediaeval and Renaissance; because you see how 
Spenser, by his appropriation of these elements became 
himself the Platonist, the artist, the moralist, and fused 
all in the passion for beauty on earth and in the heavens 
above, and so centred his whole nature toward God; 
and what took place in him may take place, according 
to its measure, in us. For, though the thoughts of men 
change from century to century, and one guiding prin- 
ciple yields to another, and the ideal life is built up in 
new ways in successive generations, yet the soul's life 
remains, however cast in new forms of the old passion 
for beauty and virtue. If Spenser be a poet's poet, as 
they say, let him appeal to the poet in you — for in 
every man there is a poet ; let him appeal in his own way, 

[135] 



THE TORCH 

as a teacher of the spiritual life; and, if my wish might 
prevail, let him come most home to you and receive inti- 
mate welcome as the Puritan lover of beauty. 



[136] 



The Torch 

VI 



MILTON 



Milton is a great figure in our minds. He is a very lonely 
figure. For one thing, he has no companions of genius 
round him; there is no group about him, in his age. 
Again, he was a blind old man, and there is something in 
blindness that, more than anything else, isolates a man; 
and in his case, by strange but powerful contrast, his 
bhndness is enlarged and glorified by the fact that he 
saw all the glory of the angels and the Godhead as no 
other mortal eye ever beheld them, and the fact that he 
was bUnd makes the vision itself more credible. And 
thirdly he has impressed himself on men's memories as 
unique in character; and, in his age defeated and given 
o'er, among his enemies exposed and left, with the Puri- 
tan cause lost, he is the very type and pattern of a great 
spirit in defeat — imprisoned in his bhndness, poor, neg- 
lected, yet still faithful and the master of his own integ- 
rity; for us, almost as much as a poet, he remains the 

[139] 



THE TORCH 

intellectual champion of human liberty. So through cen- 
turies there has slowly formed itself this lonely figure in 
our minds as our thought of Milton, and as Caesar is a 
universal name of imperial power, the name of Milton 
has become a synonym of moral majesty. But it was not 
thus that he was thought of in his own times. There is no 
evidence that Cromwell or the other important men of 
the state knew that Milton was greater than they, or that 
he was truly great at all ; to them he was pre-eminently 
a secretary in the state department. The next generation 
of poets — Dryden — called him "the old schoolmas- 
ter," you remember. In his earlier years he appealed to 
the taste of a few cultivated and travelled gentlemen, 
like Sir Henry Wotton, as a graceful and noble-lan- 
guaged poet; but it was a full generation after his death 
that he was accepted into the roll of the great, by Addi- 
son in the *' Spectator, " and the next century was well on 
its way before he was imitated by new men as the Eng- 
lish model of blank verse. In the literary tradition of 
England, however, he is now established, and for all of 
us he stands apart, a majestic memory, as I have said, 
touched with the sublimity of his subject and with the 
sublimity of his own character. There is, too, in our 
thoughts of him, something grim, something of the 
sterner aspect of historical Puritanism; the softness of 
Spenser, the softness of his youth, had gone out of him, 

[140] 



MILTON 
and he had all the hardness of man in him — he was 
trained down to the last ounce — he was austere. Yet I 
love to recall his youth — you remember the fair boy- 
face of the first portrait — a face of singular beauty ; and 
you know his pink and white complexion was such at 
the University that he was called " the Lady of Christ's" ; 
and, in those first years of his poetizing, he was deep in 
the lovehest verse of Greece and Italy, in Pindar and 
Euripides, in Petrarch and Tasso, as well as in Shaks- 
pere and Spenser who were his Enghsh masters. He was 
a young humanist — filled to overflowing with the new 
learning and its artistic products, a lover of them and of 
music, and of everything beautiful in nature — he was 
especially a landscape-lover. Even then the clear spirit 
— the white soul — somewhat too unspotted for human 
affections to chng about, it may be — was there ; you 
hear it singing in the high and piercing melody of the 
"Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which 
happily is usually a child's first knowledge of him; a cer- 
tain loofness of nature he has, and nowhere do you find 
in his English verse — nor do I find it in his Latin verse 
where it is sometimes thought to be — nowhere do you 
find the note of friendship, of that companionableness 
which is often so charming a trait in the young lives of 
the poets. But within his own reserves — and perhaps 
the more precious and refined for that very reason — 

[141] 



THE TORCH 

there was the same sensuous delight in the artistic things 
of sense, in natural beauty, in romantic charm, in the 
lines of the old poets, that there was in Spenser; and in 
this he was, as we mark hterary descent, the child of 
Spenser, though of course it was fed in him from other 
sources and in larger measure, too. For he was a better 
scholar than Spenser — his times allowed him to be — 
and he had a far more powerful intellect. But, in these 
years of his milder and happier youth, when he was liv- 
ing in the country in his long studies — he was a student 
at ease till thirty — and when he was travelling in Italy, 
he was in the true path of Spenser and the Renais- 
sance, the path of beauty. Thus he writes in a letter 
to a friend — "What besides God has resolved concern- 
ing me, I know not, but this at least : He has instilled into 
me at all events a vehement love of the beautiful. Not 
with so much labour as the fables have it, is Ceres said 
to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as I am wont 
day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful 
through all the forms and faces of things (for many are 
the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me 
on as with certain assured traces." This is that same 
creed of Plato that entered so deeply into Spenser — 
the faith in the divine leading of beauty. How permanent 
its doctrine was in Milton's mind will appear later; but 
here its presence is to be observed, because it gives to 

[142] 



MILTON 
Milton the true quality and atmosphere of his lost 
youth, and also marks the great difference in tone and 
temper between the earlier poems — so golden phrased, 
so mellifluous, so happy — and the poems of his age, the 
** Paradise Lost " and " Regained " and the " Samson." 
In " Comus," more particularly in " L' Allegro " and *' II 
Penseroso," is the young Milton — he that the fair- 
haired boy grew into, the humanist student, the writer 
of ItaKan sonnets, the "landscape-lover, lord of lan- 
guage " — before Cromwell's age laid its heavy and 
manhood-enforcing hand on the poet who chose first to 
serve his country. 

But it is the poet of whom I am to speak; and, perhaps, 
before entering on the subject of his verse, it may be well 
first to endeavour to mark his place more precisely in 
EngKsh poetry and to account, partially at least, for its 
historical distinction. A poet, so great as Milton, you 
may be sure, occupies some point of vantage in history ; 
he embodies some climax in the intellectual or artistic 
affairs of the world; and in Milton's case there are, I 
think, two historical considerations not commonly 
brought forward. I have had a good deal to say about 
allegory. It was the characteristic literary form of the 
Middle Ages ; and the substitution of the direct story of hu- 
man life in its place is one of the traits of modern times. 
You remember that the English drama, beginning from 

[143] 



THE TORCH 

miracle plays and moralities and passing through the 
stage of historical plays came finally in Shakspere to a 
representation of human Ufe as it is in the most direct 
manner. Those of you who saw the play of "Every- 
man " last year have a very vivid idea of what allegory is 
in a drama, and how such a drama differs from " Romeo 
and Juliet." In " Everyman " abstract principles are per- 
sonified, and their play in life illustrated; in " Romeo and 
Juliet," the passions and virtues are in the form of char- 
acter, are humanized as we say, are there not as abstract 
principles but as human forces. The development of 
English drama from an allegorical mode of presenting 
life and character to a human realization of them in men 
and women culminated in Shakspere, who thus stood at 
a historic moment of climax in the evolution of his art. 
Now, you easily recognize the likeness of such an alle- 
gorical play as " Everyman " to Spenser's " Faerie 
Queene," in its method of personifying the virtues and 
the temptations. Religious narrative poetry remained 
allegorical, and mediaeval in artistic method, not only in 
Spenser, but in his successors, such as the Fletchers. 
Milton was the first English poet to humanize complete- 
ly the characters and events of religious story, to put the 
religious scheme and view of the world into the form of 
human things, and to expel from the work the abstract 
allegorical element wholly. Thus he is related to pre- 

[144] 



MILTON 

vious narrative religious poetry in England precisely as 
Shakspere is to the moralities of early drama. He stands 
at this point of climax in the evolution of his particular 
branch of poetic art. Religious poetry was sixty years 
later than dramatic poetry in reaching this perfect hu- 
manization of its material ; and thus it happens that Mil- 
ton, though so much younger than the Elizabethans, is 
commonly thought of as belonging to their company and 
in fact the last late product of the age of th^r genius. 
Secondly, we are accustomed to think of the Renais- 
sance as on the whole an affair of the southern nations, 
and especially of Italy; but it was a European move- 
ment, a wave of thought and peculiar passion that slowly 
crept up the North, and it reached its furthest point in 
England, and there, as I think, it reached its highest lit- 
erary development. Shakspere was the climax of the Re- 
naissance ; its passion for individuality, for a free career 
for the human soul, and its instinct of the dignity of per- 
sonal life, were the very forces to unlock most potently 
dramatic power; and in Shakspere this was accom- 
plished, and you know how besides he used its material 
and lived in its atmosphere. Spenser, also, as I said in the 
last lecture, took the worship of beauty and the idea of 
the courtier from the Renaissance, spiritualized the one 
and Christianized the other, and gave them a new career 
in English Puritanism. Milton is to be associated with 

[ 145 ] 



THE TORCH 
Shakspere and Spenser, as a third and the last great 
representative of the Renaissance in England, and as 
there carrying its epic power to a degree of perfection far 
beyond what it had reached in Italy, exceeding both 
Ariosto and Tasso ; in him was all the learning and taste 
of the Renaissance, all its cultivation of individuality 
and respect for it — in both matter and spirit he belong- 
ed fundamentally to that movement, and was its latest 
climax. I therefore define his historical position as being 
the point at which religious poetry was completely hu- 
manized in England, and at which the Renaissance 
spirit generally as a European movement culminated in 
epic poetry. 

" Paradise Lost " is the poem by which Milton lives. 
Fond as we may be of his younger verse, and apprecia- 
tive of the eloquence of " Paradise Regained *' and of the 
tragic simplicity of "Samson Agonistes," yet popular 
judgment is to be followed in finding in " Paradise Lost " 
the true centre of Milton's genius. Every poet who 
achieves a single great poem puts his whole mind into it, 
empties his mind and tells all he knows ; his felicity is to 
find a subject which permits him to do this ; such was the 
course of Homer and Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Goethe, to 
name a few and Milton was no exception to the rule. 
He included in his poem the entire history of the universe 
from the heaven which was before creation to the millen- 

[ 146 ] 



MILTON 
nium which shall be the consummation of all things; 
and, in this great sphere of action he chose as the objec- 
tive point the moral relation of mankind to God, cer- 
tainly the highest subject in importance; and in elabor- 
ating his work he used all the wealth of his literary 
knowledge and culture, the entire literary tradition of 
the race, just as Spenser did — only more broadly; 
whatever, either in matter or method, there was service- 
able in past literature — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Ital- 
ian, and English — all this Milton used. He grasped 
and constructed the subject with great mental power 
and artistic skill; although, in minor parts, his conven- 
tional machinery and devices have been attacked, the 
leading lines of his construction stand clear of criticism. 
He really took three great themes, any one of which 
would have furnished forth a poem, and blended them 
together with such dexterity that they are seldom sepa- 
rated even in analysis — so perfect is the unity of the re- 
sulting whole. In the first place, you recognize at once in 
''Paradise Lost" a Christian adaptation of the Titan 
Myth. The rebellion of the angels is conceived as a war 
of the Titans against the gods ; and is treated in accord- 
ance with Greek imagination as a conflict in which the 
mountains were used as weapons : — 

" From their foundations, loosening to and fro. 
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load, 
[147] 



THE TORCH 

Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops 
Uplifting, bore them in their hands. Amaze 
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host 
When coming towards them so dread they saw 
The bottom of the mountains upward turned — 
Themselves invaded next, and on their J Leads 
Main promontories flung, which in the air 
Came shadowing: — ... 
So hills amid the air encountered hills — 
. . . — horrid confusion heaped 
Upon confusion rose.'* 

Satan on the flood of hell is conceived as of Titanic 
form: 

" With head uplift above the wave, and eyes 
That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides 
Prone on the flood, extended long and large. 
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge 
As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 
Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, 
Briareos or Typhon'' — 

and you recall how he reared himself from off the fiery 
lake, and took his station on the shore, with the ponder- 
ous shield whose "broad circumference hung on his 
shoulders like the moon," and stayed his steps with his 
tall spear — 

" To equal which the tallest pine 
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand ; *' 
[148] 



MILTON 

and there summoning his squadrons loomed over them 
Uke the sun " in dim ecUpse, disastrous twilight shed- 
ding on half the nations." Such is Satan's figure at the 
first, and it is by such images of Titanic darkened gran- 
deur that his form is most vividly remembered. I have 
spoken of the diflSculty the poets have had in defining 
the forms of the Titans to the eye. Milton solves the 
problem by ascribing to the devil and his angels no deter- 
minate form; they are, so to speak, collapsible and ex- 
tensible at will; and they take the appropriate scales of 
proportion in whatever scene they are placed. 

It is common to think of Satan as the true hero of the 
poem, and as an imaginative figure he certainly occupies 
the foreground ; yet to Milton he was a hateful being, and 
I am convinced that familiarity with the poem takes 
from him that admiration which properly should belong 
to the hero, and at the end he is clearly felt as the object 
of repulsive evil, whom Milton meant him to be. Mil- 
ton's method, after presenting Satan in sombre but ma- 
jestic form, is gradually to debase him to the eye as well 
as to the mind. Here the treatment sets him apart from 
any conception of the Titan Prometheus in bonds; for 
Prometheus is never felt to be debased even physically 
by the punishment of Jove. The first revolt of the reader's 
mind from its initial admiration for Satan takes place, I 
think, acutely in the scene at the gate of hell when he 

[149] 



THE TORCH 

meets Sin and Death. The association of Satan with such 
horrible beings as they are represented to be, and the 
knowledge that his intimacy with them is that of father- 
hood, shocks the mind with ughness — ughness that is 
almost bestial in its effect. When he reaches the new 
earth, after his address to the Sun, he is seen transformed 
in countenance — 

" Thus while he spaJce, each passion dimmed his face 
Thrice changed with pale — ire, envy and despair. 
Which marred his borrowed visage — " 

and soon he is '* squat Uke a toad" at the ear of Eve; 
whence touched by the young angel's spear, he rises 
"the grisly King," so changed from his heavenly self 
that he is unrecognized. Then, after one more grand Ti- 
tanic figuring of his might — the most impressive of all 
— as he opposes Gabriel : — 

"On the other side, Satan, alarmed. 
Collecting all his might, dilated stood. 
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved: 
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest 
Sat Horror plumed; — " 

after this unforgetable and heroic figure, Milton dis- 
misses him from the poem in the scene in hell, where, re- 
turning after his triumph to take the applause of his host, 
he is, in the moment of his highest boasting, transformed 

[150] 



MILTON 
into the serpent with all his followers in Hke forms — a 
scene so repellent that perhaps none has been more ad- 
versely commented on. This gradual degradation of Sa- 
tan, in his form, is, it seems to me, a cardinal point in the 
poem. It is to be associated with Milton's idea of beauty 
— that Platonic idea which I mentioned. The first ob- 
servation of Satan in hell is the lost brightness of Beelze- 
bub whom he addresses: 

" // tiwu beest he — but oh, how fallen! how changed 
From him, who, in the happy realms of light 
Clothed with transcendant brightness, didst outshine 
Myriads, though bright! — " 

When he comes to the new creation, the radiance of the 
sun reminds him of the same change in himself, and 
when the young angel surprises him in Eden, it is his 
lost beauty that he mourns. 

" So spake the cherub: and his grave rebuke. 
Severe in youthful beauty, added grace 
Invincible, abashed the Devil stood 
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw 
Virtu£ in her shape how lovely — saw, and pined 
His loss; but chiefly to find here observed 
His lustre visibly impaired. " 

The power of beauty over him is the last vescige of his 
lost nobihty. Thus in Eden gazing on Adam and Eve, 
he says, — 

[151] 



THE TORCH 

*' Whom my thoughts pursue 
With wonder, and could love: so lively shines 
In them divine resemblance; '* 

and just before the temptation, in the presence of Eve, 
he felt her beauty to be such that — 

** That space the evil One abstracted stood 
From his own evil, and for the time remained 
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed. 
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge" 

It is only by a recovery of his evil nature that he gains 
power to go on with his deceit. Such rehcs of faded glory 
as his brow wore, such rehcs of the sense of beauty also 
remained in his spirit. The debasement of his form, cul- 
minating in the scorpion scene in hell, is — for Milton 
— one and the same thing with the corruption of his 
moral nature, and is in fact a principal means of charac- 
terization; for in each new act Satan takes a new form. 
There is nothing elsewhere in literature quite like this. 
It is, however, the peculiar meanness of his revenge 
which most degrades Satan's character; in his rebellion 
against God, in his unavailing courage when powers felt 
and depicted as great are matched against omnipo- 
tence, in the mere ruin of such tremendous power, there 
are sublime elements; but in his triumph over mankind 
there is no true joining of forces for equal encounter — 
in fact Satan is never brought in contact with Adam di- 

[152] 



MILTON 

rectly — and though Paradise is surrounded with 
guards and watched over by Uriel in the sun, these are 
no real defences; mankind is felt to be unsheltered, the 
power of Adam and Eve to remain obedient is not so pre- 
sented as to seem a match for the power of the devil, and 
Satan consequently appears to triumph over a weak and 
innocent foe, harmless to him, whom he sacrifices in a 
malignant spirit of revenge by ignoble and secret ways. 
In his own character, and apart from man, Satan em- 
bodies the Renaissance ideal of the freedom of the indi- 
\adual, of the affirmation of one's own life, of develop- 
ment of one's powers and qualities and opportunities — 
he is like a brilliant, unscrupulous, rebellious Italian 
prince having his own way with the world he is bom 
into; to conceive of him as resembling an English rebel 
against the Crown, or at all indebted to that character, 
except perhaps in the point of resolute defiance, is, I 
think, to misconceive him altogether, although it is a 
common view. He was, on the contrary, the Renaissance 
prince seeking his free career, valuing individual talent 
and force above everything, the concentration of per- 
sonal faculty, pride, ambition — and conscienceless in 
his determination to live all his life out. In his struggle 
with omnipotence, he secures respect for certain quali- 
ties of strength which in alliance with virtue are great 
qualities, and even in wickedness do not lose their im- 

[153] 



THE TORCH 
pressiveness ; but in his easy triumph over Eve in the 
Garden, and in its consequences to mankind, he be- 
comes contemptible in his aim, his method, and his 
being. 

Certain important differences in the Titan Myth as 
treated by Milton should be noticed. You observe that 
the Greek situation is reversed: the angels are the 
younger race of beings, and according to Greek ideas 
should have succeeded and thereby have asserted the 
principle of progress. The angels, however, were de- 
feated. Of course, there is no room in the scheme of the 
universe, as Milton conceived it, for any progress — the 
being and the reign of God are already perfect, and 
progress is only the salvation of man, that is, a restora- 
tion of things. Restoration, not Revolution, is Milton's 
cardinal idea. It follows from this that hell is necessarily 
the end of the angels ; it is a cul-de-sac^ a blind alley — it 
leads nowhere — it has no future ; the poem stops in that 
direction as if it had run against a wall. The denial of 
progress has brought everything to a standstill, with eter- 
nal damnation for the angels and ultimate restoration 
for mankind. It is here, I think, that modem sjrmpathy 
parts company with this portion of the poem — that is, 
with the conception of hell in it. Our thoughts are so 
pledged to the idea of progress, to the thought of evolu- 
tion as the law of all created beings, that the notion of 

[154] 



MILTON 

hell as a kind of sink and prison of the universe finds no 
place for itself in our minds. The only thing in civiliza- 
tion that resembles hell is the modem jail, and that we 
desire most potently to eliminate, in the sense that it shall 
not be a place that leads nowhere, even for the most hard- 
ened. I desire, however, only to set sharply over against 
each other in your minds the Hebrew fixity of Milton's 
thought and the Greek idea of progress, as they are 
brought out by the mythic wars of heaven in each case; 
and to suggest that the failure of the poem to interest the 
modem mind in hell, except as a spectacle, is connected 
with the fundamental denial of progress in it, and its 
departure from the thought of development. 

The second great theme which Milton incorporated 
into his poem is the Bower of Bliss. This is the theme by 
means of which love, which next to war is the great sub- 
ject of poetry, enters into the epic; the hero is with- 
drawn from battle, and tempted to forget his career in 
the world, by love for a woman. The importance of the 
theme, and its relative proportion of interest in the epic 
as a whole, steadily increased — it was a convenient way 
of withdrawing the leading character and giving the other 
heroes an opportunity for display free from his rivalry, 
it was interesting in itself as opening up the whole field 
of the romance and tragedy of love, and it was the best 
kind of an episode to vary the story. Thus the loves of 

[155] 



THE TORCH 

iEneas for Dido, in the *' ^Eneid," and of Armida for Ri- 
naldo in " Tasso," were represented. For Milton Eden is 
Bower of Bliss, in this sense. It freed his hand for de- 
scription of nature in her softest scenes and in the at- 
mosphere of love. You may recall Tennyson's summary 
of it, in his lines on Milton • — 

** Me rather all that bowery voneliness^ 
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring. 
And bloom 'profuse^ and cedar arches 
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean 
Where some refulgent sunset of India, 
Streams o^er a rich ambrosial ocean-isle f 
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 
Whisper in odorous heights of even. " 

Here Milton had the characteristic scenery of the Bow- 
er of Bliss, and he elaborated it with Renaissance rich- 
ness of luxurious natural detail. The situation was also 
characteristic, and the power of woman to weaken the 
moral force of the hero through love was illustrated : the 
issue only was different, for whereas in the normal epic 
the hero breaks his bonds and goes back to his career — 
to the founding of Rome or the capture of Jerusalem — 
Adam was made the tragic victim of his fall, and with 
him all mankind. Adam, from every point of view, holds 
an unenviable position, for a hero: he never, as I have 
said is brought to a direct encounter with Satan, his 

[156] 



MILTON 
great enemy, and in this round-about conflict in which 
he falls through the temptation of Eve his defeat is irre- 
parable. It is singular to observe that in the only other. 
English poem of epical action — in Tennyson's " Idylls 
of the King," Arthur is similarly a hero of defeat; the 
breaking of the Round Table is the catastrophe, brought 
about by the sin of Guinevere in the orthodox conven- 
tional way, and Arthur, when he sails away " to heal him 
of his grievous wound " leaves a lost cause behind him in 
the world. It would be a curious enquiry — could one 
answer it — why the two great epic poems of the English 
represent the cause of the higher life as suffering a tem- 
porary overthrow in this world. Not to enter upon that, 
however, I have only time to point out that, as it seems 
to me, modern sympathy also parts company with Mil- 
ton in this portion of the poem, inasmuch as it has 
grown unnatural for us to regard womanhood as the pe- 
culiar means by which moral character is impaired, and 
the world lost ; rather we go with Spenser in his convic- 
tion that womanhood is the inspiration of noble life. The 
character of Eve as Milton drew it is from a very an- 
cient world of myth and race-thought: the influence of 
chivalry on the worldly side, and on the spiritual side 
the influence of the beatification of motherhood in the 
Virgin Mary, have profoundly affected and changed the 
ancient thought, and though not unfelt in Milton they 

[157] 



THE TORCH 

have not sufficient power in him to modify essentially 
the primitive conception of Eve. It is the more unfortu- 
nate that Milton's own temper, as a husband, was such 
that he has vigorously emphasized in his poem the infe- 
riority of woman to man, her natural subjection to him, 
and in general has left to her only that loveliness and 
charm which most appealed to him as a poet. 

The third great theme of Milton is a cosmogony — 
that is, a story of creation : it is told by Raphael to Adam, 
and it is supplemented by the history of mankind which 
is shown to Adam prophetically by Michael. It has been 
the fashion of science to ridicule, as Huxley did, Mil- 
ton's description of the origin of living creatures ; but as 
a tale of creation, his story is quite the most consistent 
and nobly imaginative of any that poets have told, and 
his panorama of history is effectively unrolled, with 
comprehensiveness, vigour of thought and vividness of 
scene. In two respects, nevertheless, modern sympathy 
parts company with Milton here, too. He adopted as his 
scheme of the universe of space, you remember, the 
older or Ptolemaic idea, that the earth is the centre, and is 
surrounded by the spheres, one inside another, till you 
reach the outermost or primum mobile. He knew, of 
course, the Copernican scheme, which we now all hold, 
when we think of the relation of the earth to the sun and 
stars. It was, I think, the classical prepossession of his 

[158] 



MILTON 
mind — his desire for a world limited, closed and clear, 
like a Greek temple — which led him to adopt this older 
scheme of the universe. But the result is that the rest of 
the poem is apt to seem as antiquated as its celestial 
geography. Again, in his view of history, he necessarily 
made human history unroll as a consequence of the fall 
of Adam, and gave an importance to its Biblical events, 
which they can only retain in a limited way. The centre 
and movement of history are now so differently con- 
ceived by the general modern mind that Milton's ac- 
count of history has little essential interest to the reader. 
Such, as it lies in my mind, is the composition of the 
" Paradise Lost " — a Titan Myth, a Bower of Bliss, 
and a Cosmogony or story of creation and history, 
blended into one unified poem in which the central event 
is the fall of Adam. It is a poem of the Renaissance, the 
last great product of that movement flowering in the far 
and Puritan North ; it is enriched with all the treasures 
of the New Learning, softened with all the imaginative 
graces of humanism; and in the great character of Sa- 
tan, it presents, on his noble side, the most magnificent 
embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of free and impe- 
rious individuality, and on his ignoble side it reflects 
some of the fairest gleams of Platonic philosophy. I have 
indicated in what important ways it seems disconnected 
with the modern mind, in its scientific and historic 

[159] 



THE TORCH 

schemes, in its primitive view of the evil of womanhood, 
and in its opposition to the idea of progress. I should 
perhaps sum this last idea to a point, and say that in the 
poem the charter of free-will which the Creator gives 
to the angels and to Adam operates as a limitation on 
omnipotence; it is impossible for the modern mind to 
look on the Creator except as the giver of good ; and yet 
his gift in this poem so operates as to make his omnipo- 
tence continually manifest in the act of damnation; it 
operates to damn the angels through their revolt, to 
damn Adam through his fall, and to damn mankind 
through Adam. Within the limits of the action described, 
the poem is thus from the first line to the last a poem of 
the damnation of things, in which the fact of final partial 
restoration is present as an intention and promise only. 
This is what makes it a poem of past time, and removes 
it far from the modern mind. For the democratic idea — 
which is the modern mind — is a power to save : it will 
have no prisons of vengeance, no servile nor outcast 
races, no closed gates of hopeless being. "Paradise 
Lost " is thus set behind us, as an embodiment of a his- 
torical phase of the Christian idea — like Dante. 

I am aware that the verdict seems adverse to Milton; 
but it is not so in reality, though I desire to make plain 
the fact that " Paradise Lost " is now a historical poem, 
a past event in the imaginative life of the race. But no 

[160] 



MILTON 
words I can use would sufficiently express the admira- 
tion which this poem excites in me — not merely for its 
unrivalled music, nor for its style which Matthew Ar- 
nold thought keeps it alive, but for its construction as an 
act of intellect, for its sublime imagination in dealing 
with infinite space, infinite time, and eternity and the 
beings of eternity; for its beautiful surface in the scenes 
in Paradise, its idyllic sweetness and charm, the habitual 
eloquence and noble demeanour in the characters; nor 
do I find its later books less excellent, in which austere 
thought and nakedness of idea more appear — the char- 
acteristics of the poet coming into his own, and content 
with truth unadorned, simple and plain — the sign and 
proof, of which *' Paradise Regained" and "Samson 
Agonistes " are greater examples, that as a poet he was 
perfected. Small in amount, indeed, is the verse that I 
have read more often ; such strength, such exquisiteness, 
such elevation, he has no rival in, for power and grace, 
for refinement ; his voice is master of his theme; and he is 
seated in the heavens of poetry where Shelley saw him — 

" The third among the sons of light." 



[161] 



The Torch 

VII 



WORDSWORTH 



We approach our own times ; and if, hitherto, literature 
has seemed to us a somewhat far-off thing, a thing of the 
Greek Myth, of chivalric allegory, of the Renaissance 
hero, it should now grow near and fast to us as our chief 
present aid in leading that large race-life of the mind 
whose end, as I have said, is to free the individual soul. 
The notion that poetry is a thing remote from life is a 
singular delusion ; it is more truly to be described as the 
highway of our days, though we tread it, as children 
tread the path of innocence, without knowing it. Noth- 
ing is more constant in the life of boy or man than the 
outgoing of his soul into the world about him, and this 
outgoing, however it be achieved, is the act of poetry. 
It is in the realm of nature that these journeys first take 
place ; nature is a medium by which the soul passes out 
into a larger existence ; and as nature is very close to all 
men, perhaps our experience with her offers the most 

[165] 



THE TORCH 

universal, certainly it offers the most elementary, illus- 
tration of the poetical life which all men, in some meas- 
ure lead. Wordsworth is, pre-eminently, a guide in this 
region; and, as he was less indebted than poets usually 
are to the great tradition of literature in past ages, 
poetry in him seems more exclusively a thing of the pres- 
ent life, contemporary and altogether our own. Such a 
poet, endeavouring by a conscious reform to renew 
poetry in his age and bring it home to man's bosom, 
ehminating the conventional ways, images, and lang- 
uage even of the poetic past, is necessarily thrown back 
on nature, in the external world, and on character, in the 
internal world, for his subject-matter; history, except in 
contemporary forms, will be far from him, and of myth 
and chivalry, of Plato and the Italians, though he will 
have his share, he will have the least possible. This may 
leave his verse bare and monotonous in quality, but 
what substance it does contain will have great vitahty, 
for it comes directly from the man. You will observe, 
however, that his narrower scope of learning, treatment, 
and theme makes no difference in the essential point 
of interest. His longest and most deHberate poem — 
that one into which he tried to empty his entire mind, 
as I said the other night — *' The Prelude," is the history 
of the formation of his mind, he says ; that is, plainly, his 
subject is the same as Spenser's — how in our days is a 

[166] 



WORDSWORTH 
human soul brought to its fullness of power and grace ? 
The manner, the story, the accessories, the entire colour 
and atmosphere, are changed from what they were in 
the Elizabethan times, but the question abides. Spenser 
is hardly aware that nature has anything to do with 
forming the soul ; to Wordsworth, nature seems its chief 
nourishment and fosterer, almost its creator. I desire to 
illustrate how Wordsworth represented the outgoing of 
the soul in nature, as a part of its discipline, its educa- 
tion in life, hke the quest of the Knights in Spenser. 

When you go out to walk alone in a scene of natural 
beauty, your senses are first excited and interested; but 
often there arise in consequence feelings and ideas har- 
monious with the scene, and emotionally touched with 
it, which gradually absorb your consciousness; and at 
last you find yourself engaged in a mood — perhaps of 
memory — from which the external scene has entirely 
dropped away or round wliich it is felt only as a nimbus 
or halo of beauty, or mystery or calm. This happens con- 
stantly and normally to all of us, and it is an act of 
poetry ; for it is the very method and secret of the lyric. 
The poet receiving some impulse through his senses 
delights in it, and rises by natural harmony to feelings 
and ideas that belong with such joy, and ends in the 
higher pleasure to which his senses have served him as 
the stairway of divine surprise. Such a poem is Burns's 

[167] 



THE TORCH 

"Highland Mary"; he begins with the outer scene, 
woods and the summer, and you will notice how at the 
end all has dropped away except the love in his heart : 

" Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery, 
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers. 

Your waters never drumlie! 
There simmer first unfold her robes. 

And there the langest tarry; 
For there I took my last fareweel 

O' my sweet Highland Mary. 

How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk. 

How rich the hawthorn s blossom^ 
As underneath their fragrant shade, 

I clasped her to my bosom! 
The golden hours, on angel wings. 

Flew o'er me and my dearie; 
For dear to me, as light and life. 

Was my sweet Highland Mary. 

Wi monie a vow, and locked embrace. 

Our parting was fu tender; 
And, pledging aft to meet again. 

We tore, oursels asunder; 
But oh! fell death's untimely frost. 

That nipt my flower sae early! 
Now green 's the sod, and cauld 's the clay, 

That wraps my Highland Mary. 
[168] 



WORDSWORTH 

Oh, pale, pale now, those rosy lips, 

I aft hae kissed sae fondly; 
And closed for aye the sparkling glance. 

That dwelt on me sae kindly! 
And mouldering now in silent dust. 

That heart that lo'ed me dearly! 
But still within my hoscmis core 

Shall live my Highland Mary" 

His heart has taken the place of all the world as 
Mary's dwelling. 

This experience, this course of emotional thought, is 
the habit of the human heart; it is repeated countless 
times in any man's life. In each case the poem depends 
only on where we stop our minds. We may stop in the 
outer scene, and have only beautiful description : we may 
go on into the mood of imagination or memory, and end 
there; we may go further, and reach some contact with 
divine things, with God in nature. It is easy to illustrate 
the matter from Wordsworth, for he has himself defined 
these stages. You remember his account of his boyish 
skating on the ice : 

" — All shod with steel 

We hissed along the polished ice, in games 
Confederate, imitative of the chase 
And woodland pleasures, — the resounding horn. 
The pack loud-bellowing, and the hunted hare. 
[169] 



THE TORCH 

So through the darkness and the cold we flew^ 
And not a voice was idle: with the din 
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud; 
The leafless trees and every icy crag 
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills 
Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars. 
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 
The orange sky of evening died away. 

Not seldom from the uproar I retired 
Into a silent bay, — or sportively 
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng. 
To cut across the reflex of a star. 
Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed 
Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes. 
When we had given our bodies to the wind^ 
And all the shadowy banks on either side 
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still 
The rapid line of motion, then at once 
Have I, reclining back upon my heels. 
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs 
Wheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolled 
With visible motion her diurnal round! 
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train. 
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched 
Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.'* 

Any boy, who has skated on the river, has lived that 
poem: has had the physical sense of the scene, which 
arouses in him a certain reverberation of feeling. The 

[170] 



WORDSWORTH 

second stage — that of youth — is as usual, though in 
Wordsworth it was uncommonly prolonged and in- 
tense : 

'* Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first 
I came among these hills; when like a roe 
I bounded o^er the mountains, by the sides 
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams. 
Wherever nature led: more like a man 
Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then 
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days. 
And their glad animal movements all gone by) 
To me was all in all. — / cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock. 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood. 
Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite: a feeling and a love. 
That had no need of a remoter charm. 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is past. 
And all its aching joys are now no more. 
And all its dizzy raptures.^* 

Here the physical scene is less felt — the excitement, the 
reverberation, is greater. There is the third stage, to 
which in this poem he immediately passed on : 

" For I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 

[171] 



THE TORCH 

The still, sad music of humanity. 

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused. 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 

And the round ocean, and the living air. 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 

A motion and a spirit, that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 

And rolls through all things. ^* 

Here the physical scene has become abstract and ele- 
mental — diaphanous beauty — and he is in the pres- 
ence of the divine power shining through its veils. Na- 
ture, beginning with the awe of boyhood, ripening into 
the passion and high delight of youth, matures in man- 
hood in the spiritual insight which makes the daily 
process of life in merely living under the sky and in sight 
of earthly beauty an act of worship. It is plain, as I said, 
that the degree to which any man may live Wordsworth's 
poem depends only on where his mind stops in its ordi- 
nary human process, whether with the boy on the ice, the 
youth on the mountains or the man with ** the light of 
setting suns. " In all these cases, you will notice, Words- 
worth represents the soul as going out from him into 
the large material sphere. 

[172] 



WORDSWORTH 

Wordsworth, however, was acutely conscious of the 
reaction of nature on mankind, of its formative power 
over men and their Hves. The idea is most famihar to us 
as the influence of the environment; and we think of a 
sea-coast people, like the Greeks, as differing from a 
mountaineer people, like the Swiss, because of their 
natural surroundings. The idea, however, is more pre- 
cise than that. The field which the farmer tills slowly 
bends his form to itself. You remember Millet's famous 
painting " The Angelus. " The peasant who is its centre 
has been physically formed by toiling in the fields where 
he stands; you feel as you look, that the landscape itself 
is summed up, and almost embodied in him, its crea- 
ture, and the picture is spiritualized, and made a type of 
our common humanity, by the sound of the Angelus 
reflected in his prayerful attitude. That is the way that 
Wordsworth conceived of nature as forming his dales- 
men and shepherds. There is this landscape quality in 
all his memorable characters; you think of them, you see 
them, in connection with the soil. Thus you recall the 
figure of the Reaper; you see her at her task in the field, 
and the song she sings : 

The music of my heart I bore 
Long after it was heard no more** — 

that song unifies the poem and spiritualizes it, precisely 

[173] 



THE TORCH 

as the prayer does in "The Angelus." So you see 
"The Leech-Gatherer: " 

" In my mind's eye I seemed to see him face 
About the weary moors continually 
Wandering about alone and silently;'* — 

So, too, Simon Lee, the old huntsman, and Matthew 
at his daughter's grave, and Michael, the builder of the 
sheep-fold, and Ruth, and good Lord CUfford, are 
landscape figures. 

Wordsworth carried his thought of the formative 
power of nature beyond this point, and to take at once 
the characteristic poem, he saw nature forming the soul 
of a woman : 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower. 
Then Nature said, ^ A lovelier flower 
On earth was never sown; 
This child I to myself will take; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 
A lady of my own. 

'Myself will to my darling be 
Both law and impulse: and with me 
The girl, in rock and plain. 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower. 
Shall feel an overseeing power 
To kindle or restrain. 

[174] 



WORDSWORTH 

*She shall he sportive as the fawn 
That wild with glee across the lawn 
Or up the mountain springs; 
And hers shall be the breathing balm^ 
And hers the silence and the calm 
Of mute insensate things. 

* The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her; for her the willow bend: 

Nor shall she fail to see 

Even in the motions of the storm 

Grace that shall mould the maidens form 

By silent sympathy. 

* The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her; and she shall lean her ear 
In many a secret place 

Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face. 

* And vital feelings of delight 
Shall rear her form to stately height. 
Her virgin bosom swell; 

Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
While she and I together live 
Here in this happy dell.* " 

The poem comes to its climax in the thought that 
"beauty born of murmuring sound, shall pass into her 
face. " There is nothing extravagant in the idea. You 

[175] 



THE TORCH 

have all seen a face transfigured while listening to mu- 
sic, or to the sea ; and the thought is that such listening 
being habitual, the expression becomes habitual, and 
not only that but the peace and joy and inner harmony, 
which the expression denotes, have become habitual, 
that is, parts of character. Wordsworth displays his 
thought more at length in the " Tintem Alley " lines, in 
his counsel to his sister and his confessions of his own 
life with nature. In consequence of this general attitude 
of mind toward the educating power of nature, Words- 
worth held his maxim, that we "can feed this mind of 
ours with a wise passiveness. " 

He had a faith as perfect as that of the Concord phil- 
osophers in the alms of the idle hour. And he did not 
mean merely that thoughts and impressions stream in on 
one, who expands his petals to the flying pollen of 
heaven, or that moral instances like the lesson of the 
Celandine will store his collector's box, but that inti- 
macy — habitual intimacy with the highest truths of 
the soul — is reached in this way. He had the impres- 
sion that childhood was especially susceptible to these 
influences and revelations; and the glorification of 
childhood which is a marked trait of his most deeply- 
felt verse, lies in this neighbourhood of its being to nature 
and nature's revelations. In his ode on the " Intimations 
of Immortality " in childhood he pours forth, in the 

I 176 ] 



WORDSWORTH 

most passionate and eloquent phrase, his clearest, 
most vivid and most penetrating intuitions of the 
power of nature in these ways, on the boy and the 
man. 

Such are some of the moods in which Wordsworth 
conceived the operation of nature on man as moulding 
both general and individual life, the thoughts and emo- 
tions of men and women, and the soul of childhood, as if 
nature were the delegated hand of God to shape our 
lives, and carried with its touch some power to impart 
heavenly wisdom. Wordsworth, you observe, had a very 
primitive mind ; in that act of gazing on setting suns he is 
not far from being a sun-worshipper : he still can believe 
that " every flower enjoys the air it breathes. " He 
conceives of nature, as an element, in grand lines; and 
he thinks of the phases of human life even — of its great 
occupations, its affections and sorrows, almost as if they 
were parts of nature — even more closely united to it 
and with greater kindliness than Virgil represented 
them in the Georgies. This simple, primitive, elemen- 
tary mind underlies his thought of childhood, too, and 
it appears, perhaps, most significantly in the fact that 
when through nature he touches on the boundaries of 
divine being, he achieves no more than a sense of the 
presence of God in nature — it is only a silent presence 
— he does not find, so far as I can see, at any time 

[177] 



THE TORCH 

the voice of God there. This is the primitive mood of 
savage and pagan man. 

Perhaps it may be well to consider for a moment the 
place of nature in modem life, apart from Wordsworth. 
Lucretius, who first took a scientific view of the world, 
as a poet, found in nature the inveterate hard foe of 
mankind : he it was who first saw the careless gods look 
down upon 

"An ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, 
Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil. 
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil. 
Till they perish.** 

Virgil, as I have said, felt rather the kindly co-operation 
of nature with man in producing the fruits of the field, 
and the flocks and herds of the hills, to feed and clothe 
us. Our view is not so much that of Lucretius, of the 
opposition, but rather of the indifference of nature. She 
knows not mercy, nor justice, nor chastity, nor any 
human virtue ; and man in emerging from her world lives 
in a sphere of thought, conduct, and aspiration to which 
she is a stranger. Yet, that kindly co-operation that Virgil 
saw, still continues on the lower levels of life, and the 
great change is that, whereas of old and in his day the 
sense of dependence on nature, that is to say on the gods, 
was habitual and daily, now through the growth of the 

[ 178 ] 



WORDSWORTH 

world, that dependence is no longer felt as at all super- 
natural; the harvest ripens or fails, but we have little 
thought of the gods therewith ; and, in fact, the habitual 
sense of the dependence of our own bodies on the favour 
of heaven is a vanishing quality. It is a consequence of 
this that our life necessarily grows more purely spiritual, 
and such dependence on the divine as is recognized is a 
dependence of the soul itself, felt in the contemplative 
mind and much more in the life of the affections. Na- 
ture as an intermediary between God and man has lost 
in importance, through the growth and spread of the 
idea of the order obtaining in nature as against the idea 
of nature as a series of special providences in relation to 
our daily lives. I count this loss as a gain, inasmuch as it 
throws the soul back on its own higher nature and essen- 
tial life. But there is another change. Of old the thought 
was of the earth and toil upon it; that was nature; now 
our thought of nature is of a force, which we subdue. It 
has come about through the extraordinary development 
of mechanical skill. Of old we taught the winds to waft 
our ships, and the waters to drive our mills; but now — 
to take the significant example — we have enslaved the 
lightning. Nature has become in our thoughts a Cali- 
ban reduced to civility by being put in bonds. I have 
much sympathy with theoretic science; with the mind's 
view of the world — and I recognize its noble results, 

[179] 



THE TORCH 
not only in philosophic thought, but in much impres- 
sionistic art. But I have all of a poet's impatience of ap- 
plied science. I remember hearing a story years ago of a 
snail who got mounted on a tortoise: "My!" he said, 
" how the grass whistles by ! " And when I hear people 
in trolley-cars talk of riding on the wings of the lightning 
I think of the snail. What is the speed of the lightning to 
the swiftness of the "wings of meditation and the 
thoughts of love " that the soul of Hamlet knew ? Is Ni- 
agara essentially an electric-lighting plant ? I have heard 
men of science — the same men who told me that 
Homer never did anything of half the importance of a 
theorem in mechanics — I have heard them sneer at the 
old Greek idea that man was the centre of the universe 
— the Christian idea that Milton had — the idea of 
George Herbert : 

"Man is one worlds 
And hath another to attend him: — *' 

this idea was man's foolish egoism. But is it a larger 
idea to think of nature as man's Jack-at-all-trades ? 
For me, I must say, science — applied science — de- 
grades the conception of nature in narrowing it to the 
grooves of material use. Yet this is, in general, our mod- 
ern idea — the prevailing idea — of nature. What poem 
of recent years has been more acclaimed than that in 

[180] 



WORDSWORTH 
which a Scotch Presbyterian engineer found in his en- 
gine the idea of God ? It is well that he should find the 
idea there, as it was well in the eighteenth century that 
the clock-maker should find his idea of God as a clock- 
maker, since that was the measure of his knowledge of 
God; but, for all that, the narrowing influence of these 
scientific conceptions is no less. Hence it is that we fall 
into the commonest error of men — the error of per- 
spective, a wrong sense of the proportion of things. Our 
eyes are fixed on the material uses of nature, and he is 
great among us who sets her to some new task in cheap- 
ening steel or facilitating transportation. Now in Words- 
worth there is nothing of this; he hardly notices, indeed, 
what to Virgil was so important, her co-operation in 
agriculture and the life of the farm. Wordsworth restores 
to us the spiritual use of nature; and the spiritual use 
that man makes of the world is the really important 
thing. With that primitive mind of his, he realizes at 
once the closeness with which we are cradled in nature, 
the universality of her life round about us: 

" He laid us as we lay at birth 
On the cool flowery lap of earth; 
Smiles broke from us and we had ease. 
The hills were round us, and the breeze 
Went o'er the sunlit fields again: 
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.'* 
[181] 



THE TORCH 
For the least conscious, for the semi-vital among men, 
nature is the blanket of God round about them; for the 
most spiritually-minded, nature is the ante-room to His 
presence, and our way to higher Ufe. In poem after 
poem Wordsworth illustrates all modes of approach by 
which on the threshold of nature the soul grows con- 
scious of itself; especially he shows how nature feeds the 
mind with beauty through the senses: 

'* Sensations sweet 
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart 
And passing even into the purer mind ; '* 

and thus is a chief minister to us in that building of our 
own world — physical, emotional, moral — each one of 
us for himself, which is the necessary task of all. It is not 
a machine that we have to make, to hew wood and draw 
water for us, and carry us from place to place at elec- 
trical speed; it is a world that we have to build for our 
souls to live in and grow through, a world of happy 
memory, of pure hope, of daily beauty, the world of our 
habitual selves, and Wordsworth shows what elements 
for such a world of the soul — for such a daily self — 
nature provides and what is the art of its construction. 
To Wordsworth, however, no more than to other poets 
was nature the whole life: and even to him, if you stop 
to think about it, nature has no life of her own, but is 

[ 182 ] 



WORDSWORTH 

only one mode of the soul's existence and self-con- 
sciousness. He came back at last, as all do, to man as 
the only subject that finally interests men. I said that in 
nature he found only the presence, but not the voice, of 
God. The voice of God he found in his own bosom, in 
conscience, in duty, as you remember in his ode to duty 
he begins: 

" Stern daughter of the voice of God, 
O duty — if that name thou love — *' 

The second great root of his poetry is character — 
moral character, and in defining and enforcing its ideals 
none of our poets is more truly English, more truly of 
the race to which character is always an engrossing and 
primary interest. In the poem, called '*The Happy 
Warrior " he delineated both the public and private as- 
pects of character, as conceived by the English, with a 
felicity of phrase and solidity of thought, and also with 
eloquent distinction, such as to place the poem apart by 
itself as unique in our literature. The better example, 
however, for my purposes, is the portrait of a woman — 
** She was a phantom of delight, " — the companion-piece 
to that I have already read — in which he begins from 
the things of sense, and goes on, in the way I have de- 
scribed, to the moral, and finally to the spiritual sphere. 
Here the lyric method of poetry is again illustrated — 

[183] 



THE TORCH 

how, starting from the external world it becomes at last 
purely internal — which is the method, as you recognize, 
of all poetical life in essence. Apart from abstract char- 
acter, the sphere of human life which Wordsworth most 
attended to was of course that humble life of the poor 
in which he was most interested because they were near 
to the soil, and, as he thought, nearer on that account to 
nature's hand. It is, however, a transparent error to 
think of dalesmen and shepherds as nearer to nature in 
this sense; it is one of the fallacies of civilized life; for 
Wordsworth himself is the shining example how much 
more, in both intimacy and fullness, was his life with 
nature than that of any other in his generation. Nature 
is not to be thought of as a kind of agricultural school 
education, a thing for children and dalesmen; but the 
same rule that holds of all the gift of life holds here, that 
the beneficence, the splendour and mystery of the gift, in- 
creases with the power of him who receives it. Words- 
worth was the true and faithful poet of lowly lives, and 
as such he is endeared to humanity; he was the second 
great democratic poet, succeeding Bums, from whom he 
learned to be such, as he says; but he comes more di- 
rectly and intimately into our own lives through his per- 
sonal force — through his own experience of what nature 
meant to him. 

In what sense, then, is Wordsworth a race-exponent ? 

[184] 



WORDSWORTH 

Principally and distinctively in the fact that he sums up, 
illustrates, and amplifies the experience of the race in its 
direct relation to nature. With that primitive mind on 
which I have dwelt, he spanned the difference between 
the earUest and the latest thought of the race; to him, in 
certain moods, nature was animated with a life like our 
own, he believed it enjoyed its life as we do, and this is 
primeval belief; at the other end of progress he was as 
pantheistic as he was animistic here, and saw nature 
only as another form of di^^ne being. Thus he contem- 
plated nature almost as the savage and almost as the 
philosopher, and commanded the whole scope of hu- 
man thought with relation thereto. He presented nature 
through this wide range as a discipHne of the soul in its 
development; it is, first, a discipUne in beauty, in the 
power to see and appreciate loveliness, and he especially 
values this as a means of building up a beautiful mem- 
ory — perhaps the chief consolation of advancing life. 
So, in the lines to the " Highland Giri, he writes: " 

" In spots like tJiese it is we prize 
Our memory; Jeel that she hath eyes:** 

So he wrote again of that inward eye 

" Which is the bliss of solitude** — 

and illustrates it by the \^sion of the daffodils ; and in the 
same spirit counsels his sister : 

[185] 



THE TORCH 

" Thy mind 
Shall be a mansion for all lovely form^. 
Thy memory be as a dwelling place 
For all sweet sounds and harmonies.^* 

Secondly, it is a discipline of the emotions, which nature 
evokes and exercises. The emotion is represented, nearly 
always I think, as that reverberation of feeling which I 
spoke of. Perhaps its most spiritualized example is in 
Tennyson : 

" TearSy idle tears: I know not what they mean,, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair. 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes 
In looking on the happy avtumn fields. 
And thinking of the days that are no more.^* 

The reverberation of emotion, here, is the poem. It is 
this reverberation, truly speaking, which Wordsworth 
interprets as the sense of the divine presence in nature : 

" A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts^* — 

Thirdly, it is a discipline of the moral sense. Here, per- 
haps, we have most difficulty in going along with Words- 
worth. When he says : 

** One impulse from a vernal word 
They teach you more of man^ 
Of moral evil and of good 
Than all the sages can:** 
[186] 



WORDSWOETH 

when he writes of himself as 

'*Well pleased to recognize 
In nature, and the language of the sense^ 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse. 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
0/ all my moral being ^^ — 

we do not readily understand his meaning. Yet if you rec- 
ollect his life, as his poems disclose it like a series of an- 
ecdotes of what happened to him, you see not only how 
often he returned from his rambles in the hills with a 
strengthened moral mind in consequence of some lesson 
he may have derived from some flower or cloud, which 
spelled out for him in an image of beauty his secret 
thought, or set up by an initial impulse that train of feel- 
ing which resulted in meditative moral thought, but how 
much more often he returned so strengthened by the 
sight of some human incident, history or character which 
to him wore the aspect of a fact of nature ; for he did not 
discriminate between nature and its operation in the 
lives of common folk; all life is necessarily moral, and 
nature by passing influentially into the lives of his dales- 
men and shepherds became thereby moral in essence; 
nature exceeded its bounds here, in the moral sphere, 
just as in becoming divine it exceeded its bounds in the 
spiritual sphere. Wordsworth was no pantheist; he had 
the dews of baptism upon him and remained in the pews 

[187] 



THE TORCH 

of the establishment all his life; but, both in his panthe- 
istic verse, and in his verse ascribing moral wisdom to 
nature, he sincerely described certain experiences of his 
own in which he derived religious emotion and moral 
strengthening and enlightenment through his contact 
with nature and the natural lives of his neighbours on the 
moors and the hills. Emotion was always mainly fed in 
him, imaginatively, from the forms of nature; and the 
strengthening of emotion, and the habit of it, necessar- 
ily builds up the moral nature of man — it is the mode 
of its nurture. I am accustomed to say that Keats is a 
poet to be young with, and that Wordsworth is a poet to 
grow old with. The element of habit counts for much in 
such communion with nature as Wordsworth illustrates ; 
for it is not any flash of thought he brings, any revela- 
tion of emotional power as a sudden discovery of the 
soul; the power of nature has begun to steal upon the 
boy, in his skating or his nutting, or his whistling to the 
owls, and thereafter it only grows. Meditation, too, is a 
large element in the habit Wordsworth establishes to- 
ward nature, and memory, as we have seen, bears a part 
in it. It follows that, not only is his power over his read- 
ers cumulative with years, but his attitude toward na- 
ture must have the force of habit with us before it can 
render to us what it rendered to him. With the formation 
of this habit comes that consoling power which lovers 

[188] 



WORDSWORTH 

of Wordsworth find in his verse, what Arnold called the 
healing power of nature. I do not myself see any healing 
power of nature in such instances as Michael, or Ruth, 
of the affliction of Margaret ; there are wounds which na- 
ture cannot heal, and Wordsworth was sensible of this : 
he did not, as Arnold says he did, look on " the cloud of 
mortal destiny " and put it by; no English poet can. But it 
is true that in the life-long appeal that Wordsworth's 
verse makes especially to the sober and aging mind by 
virtue of its equable temper, its moral strength, its 
simple human breadth of sympathy, as well as by its su- 
preme rendering of the spiritual uses of nature in our 
daily lives, its tranquillizing power is also a main source 
of its hold on the general heart. 

Such, in its phases, is the discipline of nature for the 
soul as Wordsworth presents it. The poetic act, as I have 
said, is the going out of the soul. If we do not fare forth 
on any quest of the old knightly days, yet all life consists 
in such a faring forth, in going out of ourselves into 
some larger world, practically into a club or a church or 
a college or a political party or a nation — in litera- 
ture it consists in going out into the race-mind, in any 
or all its forms, into the life of the race as an idealized 
past, or as a part of present nature or present humanity. 
I have illustrated, hitherto, the imaginative or spiritual 
forms of history, and to-night the imaginative or spiritual 

[189] 



THE TORCH 

forms of nature, in either of which the soul may take its 
course in the larger life, and going out of itself find the 
freedom of the universe its own — in beauty, reason, 
liberty, righteousness, love — the ideal elements to 
which all paths, whether of history or nature, lead, when 
imagination is the guide. It remains only to illustrate the 
same general theory by the example of the poet who 
dealt most powerfully with human life as a thing of the 
present as Wordsworth dealt most powerfully with 
nature in the same way. That is the next, and final, 
lecture. 



[190] 



The Torch 

VIII 



SHELLEY 



In lecturing the other night on Wordsworth I did not re- 
fer to his best-known verses, the half-dozen lines which 
have more luminousness of language, I think, than any 
other English words: 

" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star. 
Hath had elsewhere its setting. 

And Cometh from afar; 
Not in entire forgetfulness. 
And not in utter nakedness. 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home. " 

"Magnificent poetry," said John Stuart Mill, "but 
very bad philosophy. " However that may be, the Hues 
express the idea, natural to all of us, that we are in some 
sense heirs of past glory. We are accustomed to think of 
heredity, as something founded as it were in past time 

[193] 



THE TORCH 

under the operation of the laws of natural selection, and 
stored in us physically; and embryologists say that the 
long series of physical changes, in consequence of which 
man finally became in his body the lord of hving crea- 
tures, is reflected with great rapidity in the human em- 
bryo, so that when the body is born it has in fact passed 
through the entire race-history in a physical sense. We 
are no sooner born, however, than we enter at once on a 
new period of heredity, and acquire also with great ra- 
pidity the mental and moral powers which originally 
arose slowly in the race through long ages of growth, 
and we become civilized men by thus appropriating 
swiftly funds of knowledge and habits of thinking, feel- 
ing and acting ; this is the education which makes a man 
contemporary with his time, and perhaps it normally 
ends in the fact, for most men, that he does what is ex- 
pected of him, and also feels and thinks what is ex- 
pected of him. That is the conventional, well brought 
up, civilized man. 

There is a third sphere of heredity, with which these 
lectures have been concerned, in which it is more a mat- 
ter of choice, of temperament and vitality, whether a 
man will avail himself of it, and appreciate it. Men, 
generally speaking, are but dimly aware of their powers 
and capacities outside of the practical sphere; in our 
growing years we require aid in discovering these ca- 

[194] 



SHELLEY 

pacities and exercising these powers; we require, as it 
were, some introduction to ourselves, some encourage- 
ment to believe we really are the power of man that we 
are, and some training in finding out vitally what that 
power of man in us is. This is our use — the earliest — 
of literature ; it interprets us to ourselves. It does this by 
fixing our attention on some things that we might not 
have noticed — on natural things of beauty, and by pro- 
viding appropriate thoughts and stimulating delightful 
emotion in respect to these things; or it helps us by 
arousing feeling for the first time, perhaps, with regard 
to some part of life, and by giving noble expression to 
such new feeling or to some emotion hitherto vague and 
indeterminate in our bosom ; and it especially aids us by 
giving play to our forces in an imaginary world, where 
both thought and feeling may have a career which 
would be impossible to us in our narrow world of fact. 
The poverty of not only the young, but of most men, in 
spiritual experience, is probably far greater than men 
of maturity and culture readily conceive; it is possible 
that the forms of the church even far exceed the capacity 
of the people to interpret them, just as Dante, or any 
high work of imagination would. The poets interpret 
what is forming in us, and offer new objects of contem- 
plation and emotion in the imaginary world ; they go but 
a little way before us, for they can be read and under- 

[195] 



THE TORCH 

stood only by the light of our own experience; but, 
hand by hand, one leads us to another till we are in the 
presence of the greatest. I do not know whether Shaks- 
pere unlocked his heart, as Wordsworth said, with the 
key of the sonnet ; but I know literature is the key which 
unlocks our own bosoms to ourselves ; though, in con- 
sequence of that respect for the individual life of the 
soul, which is one of the mysterious marks of man's 
nature, no hand but our own can turn the lock in its 
wards. What I described the other night as the poetic 
act — the going forth of the soul — must be the act of 
the man himself; but it is through literature that the 
paths make out — the highways trodden by many feet. 
As you go out on these great highways of the soul, 
in Dante, in Shakspere, in Goethe, a strange thing will 
happen to you: it will seem, in the variety of new ideas, 
in the flood of new feeling arising in you, that you are 
changed within, that you have found almost a new self. 
I remember once when I was studying the now lost art 
of wood-engraving, looking as I was at hundreds of 
woodcuts constantly, it happened that when I went out 
to walk, I saw woodcuts in the landscape; my eye hav- 
ing grown accustomed to certain line and form-arrange- 
ments of an artistic sort, naturally picked out of the gen- 
eral landscape such arrangements, as you make pic- 
tures in the fire ; that is to say, my eye, dwelling on this 

[196] 



SHELLEY 

feature and neglecting that, composed the landscape, 
made a picture of it. Now that is the constant act of life. 
The human soul finds the world a heterogeneous mass 
of impressions; and it attends to certain things, and 
neglects others, and composes its picture of life that 
way; prefers certain memories, certain desires, and so 
builds its own world, as I have constantly said. It 
applies this method of composition even to itself. You 
read Byron, and before you know it you see 
yourself in Byron's ways, you pick out and favour 
your Byronic traits, you find you are Byron in your 
self-portrait ; or you read Thackeray and find yourself 
in "Arthur Pendennis; " or, on the broader scale, you 
read Greek a good deal, Greek history and art as well 
as literature, and you find you see the world as a Greek 
world — or, again, as a French world, as the case 
may be. The change is a great one, amounting almost to 
the discovery of a new world and yourself a new self in it. 
So, in Goethe's life, the Italian journey and the study of 
the antique made a new and greater Goethe of him. So 
the mind of Milton, originally English, was Hebraized, 
Hellenized and Italianized. The discovery of the new 
self may be often repeated, and each new self enters into 
and blends with the old selves, and makes your personal- 
ity, or, at least, gives form to it. So the young Roman 
poet was Homer and Lucretius and the Alexandrians, 

[197] 



THE TORCH 

and is Virgil; so the young Italian was Virgil, and is 
Dante; so the young Englishman was Theocritus, was 
Catallus, was Keats, and is Tennyson. What is involved, 
you see, is a kind of mental embryology; just as the phy- 
sical man sums up rapidly the age-long change from the 
lowest to the highest creature-life, just as the convention- 
al man sums up in the same way the ages from barbar- 
ism to civilization and spans them in his education, so 
here the soul in its highest life — that free soul that I 
have spoken of — sums up and spans the difiPerence be- 
tween the ordinary man and the highest culture the race 
has ever known, and now holds in his own spirit that ac- 
cumulation, that power of man, which (by heredity en- 
tered into of his own choice) makes him an heir of past 
glory — for the splendour, the leading light, the birth- 
light of which Wordsworth's verse is none too extrava- 
gant an expression. 

Literature, then, is the key to your own hearts; and 
going out with the poets you slowly or swiftly evolve new 
life after new life, and enter partially or fully on that 
race-inheritance which is not the less real and sure be- 
cause you must reach out your hand and take it instead 
of having it stored in your nerves and senses at birth; 
predispositions to appropriate it are stored even there, 
but it is a thing of the spirit and must be gathered by the 
spirit itself. You will, perhaps, pardon one word of 

[198] 



SHELLEY 

warning. This process that I have described is a vital 
process, a thing of Hfe, and it must be real. There is al- 
ways at work that selective principle by virtue of which 
you compose life in the ways most natural to you. It may 
well happen that some great author does not appeal to 
you, and the reason is that you have not in yourself the 
experience to read him by; moreover, being a process of 
life, this process is one of joy, and if any author, no matter 
how great, does not give you pleasure, the process is not 
taking place. Therefore, do not read books that, after a 
fair trial, give no pleasure; do not read books that are 
too old, too far in advance of you. If they are really great, 
they will come in time; but if, for example, Dante's 
*' Inferno " is a weary place to your feet and your soul 
feels its thousand contaminations, do not stay in such a 
place; and so of all other books with names of awe. Hon- 
esty is nowhere more essential than in literary study; 
hypocrisy, there, may have terrible penalties, not merely 
in foolishness, but in misfortune; and to lie to oneself 
about oneself is the most fatal lie. The stages of life 
must be taken in their order; but finally you will dis- 
cover the blessed fact that the world of literature is one 
of diminishing books — since the greater are found to 
contain the less, for which reason time itself sifts the 
relics of the past and leaves at last only a Homer for 
centuries of early Greece, a Dante for his entire age, a 

[ 199 ] 



THE TORCH 
Milton for a whole system of thought. To understand 
and appreciate such great writers is the goal; but the 
way is by making honest use of the authors that appeal 
to us in the most living ways. The process that I have 
described is the one by which all men advance and come 
into their own — men of genius no less than others : for I 
cannot too often repeat the fundamental truth that the 
nature and power of the soul, its habits, its laws and 
growth, are the same in all men ; it sometimes happens 
that a man who goes through the process of this high 
spiritual life, becoming more and more deeply, vari- 
ously and potently human, developing this power of 
man in him, has also a passion for accomplishment — 
and that is one of the marks of a man of genius. Shelley 
was such a man; and I desire to present him, as a man 
with a passion for accomplishment, but also as an extra- 
ordinarily good illustration of the mode in which a man, 
through literature, evolves the highest self of which 
mankind is capable, summing up in his own soul the 
final results and forward hopes of the race. 

At the outset let me guard against a common mis- 
conception. Shelley is too often thought of as having 
something effeminate in his nature, This is due, in great 
part, to his portrait which with all its beauty, gives an 
impression of softness, dreaminess and languour; in it 
there is little characteristically masculine. It is also due, 

[200] 



SHELLEY 

in some measure, to the preponderance of feeling over 
thought in his verse, of imagery over idea, and in general 
of atmosphere over form; his is what we may call a 
colour-mind. The misconception of Shelley to which I 
refer is most boldly stated by Matthew Arnold, who 
called him an "ineffectual angel beating his beautiful 
wings in the void. " Now nothing could be said of Shel- 
ley that is more wrong than that. Shelley was a high- 
spirited, imaginative child; he was a resolute Eton boy 
— who would not fag, you remember, and being always 
persistent in rebellion, carried his point; he rode, and 
shot the covers in his younger days, and was a good 
pistol-shot, all his life delighting in the practice. He was a 
very practical man, in business affairs, after he came of 
age and had learned something of human nature. He 
was the only man who could handle Byron with tact and 
reason. He made a very good will. In fact, his practical 
instinct developed equally with his other qualities. 
Neither was he a moping poet. He had fits of high 
spirits — of gaiety; he used habitually to sing to him- 
self going about the house. As boy and man, both, he 
was typically English, aristocratically gentle in all his 
ways and behaviour, only nervous, impulsive, strong, 
wilful, quick to see, quick to respond — a very deter- 
mined and active person; and, in fact, manly to the full 
limit of English manhood. Perhaps there is always some- 

[201 ] 



THE TORCH 

thing feminine in poetic beauty — the expression that 
we see typically in the pictures of St. John the Beloved ; 
but, apart from that light on his face and that grace in 
all his ways, Shelley was as manly a man as they ever 
make in England. 

This being premised, then, one reason why Shelley is 
so good an illustration of the development of a modern 
soul is the fact that the record with respect to him is so 
complete. No human life, with the exception possibly of 
Lincoln's, has been so entirely exposed to our knowl- 
edge, from his earliest days: it seems as if nothing of 
him could ever die, no matter how slight, bojdsh and 
trivial it might be. Thus it comes about that we see his 
forming mind in its first crudities. He was an eager boy, 
alive, awake, interested, voracious, pressing against the 
barrier of life for his career. He began with a taste for 
the most extravagant, melodramatic romance — what 
was then known as the German tale of wonder, in which 
the young Sir Walter Scott had also taken much in- 
terest; it was what we should describe as a dime-novel 
taste, except that its characters were monks and nuns 
and alchemists and wandering Jews; Shelley himself 
wrote two romances and many short and one long poem 
of this sort by the time he was sixteen years old, and 
published them moreover. He was always impatient, 
quick to act, to be doing something. His imagination 

[202] 



SHELLEY 
was first fed by this sensationalism, and it was also scien- 
tifically excited by the spectacular side of chemical ex- 
periments ; and then he began to think — at first it was 
politics — such things as the freedom of the press, the 
rights of Catholics, reform; or it was morals — such 
things as property, marriage ; or it was metaphysics — 
such things as Locke's sensational philosophy, and the 
ideas of the age. Radical ideas in all their imperfection 
of newness filled his mind, reform took hold of him. He 
went to Ireland to make speeches, and made them, dis- 
tributed tracts, subscribed to funds, helped men who 
were prosecuted, especially editors, got himself put 
under observation as a dangerous character : and not yet 
twenty-one years old. 

There was then little sign of poetic genius in him; he 
had always written verses, of course, but there is no line 
of his early writing that indicates any talent even for 
good verse. But his mind had dipped in life, in thought, 
in action, and was impregnated with all kinds of power; 
especially his mind had dipped in ideas — the idea of 
the perfectibility of mankind, of experimental method in 
science, of immediate social change in England in such 
fundamental things as wealth and marriage. He was 
always a person of convictions rather than opinions; he 
wanted to live his thoughts, and together with his great 
causes he carried about a full assortment of minor mat- 

[203] 



THE TORCH 

ters, such as vegetarianism, for example. In a word, he 
began as a Reformer, and he was as complete an in- 
stance of the type as ever walked even these streets of 
Boston. But he found language more generally useful 
than action in standing forth for his ideas; and great 
command of language having already accrued to him 
through the incessant hammering of his brains on these 
ideas, making them malleable and portable and eflficient 
for human use, there came to him also that intenser 
power of language, that passion of expression which finds 
its element in noble cadences and vital images of poetry 
as naturally as a bird flies in the air. Yet the passage 
from the power of prose to the power of poetry in 
Shelley is not a very marked advance. What he dis- 
covered, in writing " Queen Mab, " his first real poem, 
was the opportunity that poetry gives for unfolding 
a great deal of matter with logical clearness and 
eloquent effect, with immense concentration and in- 
tensity; what he discovered was the economy of 
poetry, the economy, that is, of art, as a mode of ex- 
pression; and, in fact, when he had written "Queen 
Mab " he found — to use the words I have habitually 
employed — that in its few hundred lines he had emp- 
tied his mind; he had done what genius always does. 
The poem, however, was a Reformer's poem; it con- 
tained a striking rendering of the image of the starry 

[ 204 ] 



SHELLEY 

universe, an account of the history of man's progress, 
and some deHcate poetical machinery in the mere set- 
ting of the piece. Its true subject was social reform. 
Five years later he emptied his mind a second time in 
the poem called " The Revolt of Islam " ; in the interval 
he had withdrawn more from individual enterprise and 
special causes in the contemporary world, and had come 
to realize the power of literature, as greater than any he 
he could exercise otherwise, in the bringing of a better 
world on earth; but he still held to political and social 
reform, and wrote, under the example and in the stanza 
of Spenser, this allegorical tale of the Revolution and the 
successful reaction against it then displayed in Europe; 
the poem remains an inferior poem, in consequence of its 
material and method; but it contained all that was in 
Shelley's mind at the time, and was written in the model 
and method of what was then to him the highest art. 
Five years again went by, and he again emptied his 
mind in the " Prometheus Unbound. " 

In the interval great changes had taken place in him. 
He was still further removed from practical measures of 
reform — not that he ever lost interest in them — but 
practical reform requires a machinery that he could not 
provide; and he now more fully recognized the power of 
ideas, of eloquence to stir men's hearts, of poetry to em- 
body images of the ideal with mastering force; and es- 

[205] 



THE TORCH 
pecially he recognized the fact that practical reform is a 
thing that from moment to moment results from ab- 
stract principles which have an eternal being. More- 
over, he had fallen in with Greek, in this interval, with 
Greek choral poetry on the one hand, and with Greek 
Platonic philosophy on the other. His mind was Hellen- 
ized; like a dark cloud, his soul approached the dark 
clouds of ^schylus and Plato; and the contact was an 
electrical discharge of power : the flash of that discharge 
was the "Prometheus Unbound." Furthermore, Shelley's 
poetical faculty had developed marvellous brilliancy , sen- 
sitiveness, colour, atmosphere, sublimity of form, suf- 
fusion of beauty, and, all this, with a lyrical volume, in- 
tensity and penetration of tone, which his earlier verse 
had not shown. He had become, under the play of life 
upon him, a poet, so throbbing with the high life of the 
soul that he seemed like an imprisoned spirit, with 
the voice of the spirit, calling to men like deep unto deep; 
and the world seemed to lie before him transfigured, 
wearing a garment of outward beauty like a new morn- 
ing, and, in the human breast clothed with freedom, 
nobility, hope, such as belongs to the forms of millennial 
days. Shelley had gathered into his heart the power of 
man that I have been speaking of, and stands forth as its 
transcendent example in his age. He had dropped from 
him, like hour-glass sand, the specific things of earlier 

[206] 



SHELLEY 
days, things of the free press, of CathoHc rights, of put- 
ting reform to the vote, of national association, of 
Welsh embankments — all things of detail ; and also 
all lesser principles of property or marriage laws; he 
had reached the fountains of all these in the single prin- 
ciple of the love of man for man, which alone he was 
now interested to preach and spread. He had let go, 
too, of all revolutionary violence, as anything more than 
a secondary means of reform, and he clung to the prin- 
ciple of patience, of forgiveness, of non-resistance, as 
the appointed means of triumph, as I have already il- 
lustrated in the treating of " Prometheus". " I have, " 
he wrote, in his preface," a passion for reforming the 
world " : it was his fundamental energy of life ; but re- 
form for him was not now to be discriminated from the 
preaching of Christ's Gospel. The boy who had begun 
with a dime-novel taste had come into such etherialized 
powers of imagination that the poem of " Epipsychid- 
ion " is, perhaps, the extreme instance of ideal purity in 
English; the boy who had begun with Locke's sensa- 
tionalism had come to be the most Platonic man of his 
age in his spirituality: the boy who had begun with an 
indignant challenge to orthodoxy had come to be the 
voice of Christianity itself in its highest forms of moral 
command ; the boy, who began as the practical reformer 
had to come to be the poet, smiting the source of all re- 

[207] 



THE TORCH 
from in the spirit itself, and using all his powers of 
thought, imagination, learning, and all the means of art, 
to set forth the ideals of the spirit in their eternal forms. 
He had passed through pohtics, philosophy, religion — 
through English and French and Greek ideas — 
through Italian and Spanish imaginative art, and he now 
summed in himself that power of man which he had 
lived through in others — it had become his, it had 
become himself. In the whole course of this development 
no trait is more important to observe, than his marvel- 
lous intellectual honesty; he took only what at any mo- 
ment was capable of living in him; he gave it free course 
in his life, outlived it, transmigrated from it, and came to 
the next stage of higher life, and so won on to the end. 

The development of Shelley was as rapid as it was 
complete; he was not yet thirty years old when he had 
become the centre of human power that he was, a centre 
so mighty that it would be two generations before its 
influence in the world, and its comparative brilliancy 
among English poets, could begin to be measured. His 
genius, we now see, was that of a double personality ; he 
had, so to speak, two selves. First, and primary in him 
was his social self, his public self, that by which he was 
a part of mankind, was interested in man, felt for man, 
suffered in man's general wretchedness in Europe, 
brooded over his destiny, formulated principles for his 

[208] 



SHELLEY 

regeneration, and lived in the hopes, the faith, the strug- 
gle of mankind. The greater works of his mind, which he 
elaborated with most conscious aim to serve the world, 
were the ones I have named, " Queen Mab," "The Re- 
volt of Islam " and " Prometheus Unbound, " with the 
later, almost episodical choric drama, called " Hellas," 
whose subject was the Greek Revolution then going on : 
all these were the expression of his social self. In early 
life, so absorbed was he in politics, morals, and phil- 
osophy, that he hardly realized he had any life except in 
these; but, as years came on him with their load, he de- 
veloped a personal self, private and individual, the Shel- 
ley who was alone in the world, on whom fell the burden 
of discouragement, the penalty of error, the blows of 
fortune and circumstance, the wounds of the heart; and it 
was in this self that his poetic power was first put forth ; 
his sensitiveness, his response to nature, his lyrical en- 
thusiasm, his aspiration, his melancholy; and he carried 
over these powers to the expression of his social self, as 
he carried over all his faculties and resources to that 
cause. But the home of his poetic genius was in his per- 
sonal self; and the poems by which he is known as an 
artist, as a mere human spirit without reference to any 
special application of its life-work, are those in which the 
personal self is directly and spontaneously expressed, the 
*' Alastor" being the first, and after it the " Adonais " 

[209] 



THE TORCH 

and the " Epipsychidion " ; and in addition to these 
longer pieces, the short lyrics, odes and stanzas, and the 
fragments, all of which are effusions, overflowings of his 
own heart. If the sense of his greatness is most supported 
by the larger creative works of his imagination, he is most 
endeared to men by these little poems of love and sor- 
row, of affection, of joy in nature, and of human regret. 

The most poignant of them are those in which the aspi- 
ration is itself a lament — and in them is the intimacy of 
the poet's heart. It is impossible to close one's eyes to the 
fact that Shelley, wholly unappreciated as he was by the 
public, or in private either for that matter, was deeply 
dejected in his last years; the personal, the artistic self, 
was always a relatively increasing part of his life, and he 
occasionally attempted great works, like the " Cenci " or 
*' Charles II, " which had no social significance. Had he 
lived, it can hardly be doubted he would have become 
more purely an artist, a creative poet, conceiving the 
cause of mankind more and more largely as a spiritual 
rather than an institutional cause, a cause of the re- 
birth of the soul itself rather than of the re-birth of na- 
tions. In his personal self one principle reigned supreme 
— the idea of love; love guided all his actions, and was 
the impulse of his being — love in all its forms, personal, 
friendly, humane; by that selective principle that I spoke 
of he saw life as a form of love. It is here that the true 

[210] 



SHELLEY 

contact occurs between his personal and his social self, 
for he made love — the love of man for man — the 
principle of society regenerated as he pictured it in the 
" Prometheus. " And again, he made love, in the " Ad- 
onais " the principle of Divine being — that Power, 

** Which wields the world with never-wearied love. 
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above." 

Wordsworth found the presence of God 

" In the light of setting suns. 
And the round ocean and the living air" — 

primarily as something external; Shelley found it pri- 
marily as something known most intimately and clearly 
in his own heart. 

A poet of really high rank is seldom a very simple 
being; he is made up of many elements, some one of 
which usually has the power of genius, and when that is 
at work in him, he is great. In Shelley there are at least 
three such elements; he was a poet of nature, and es- 
pecially he had the power to vivify nature almost as the 
Greek did, to give it new mythological being, as in " The 
Cloud." He was also a poet of man — the thought of 
man was like a flame in his bosom. And he was a poet of 
his own heart, putting his own private life into song. A 
poet is greatest when he can bring all his powers to bear 

[211] 



THE TORCH 
in one act — then he gives all of himself at once. Shel- 
ley most nearly did this, I think, in the " Ode to the West 
Wind. " The poem arises out of nature, in the triple as- 
pect of earth, air and ocean, held in artistic unity by the 
west wind blowing through them; and it becomes at its 
climax a poem of the hopes of mankind, and of Shelley 
himself as the centre of them, like a priest. So he invokes 
the West Wind to which by his act he has given an imag- 
inative being as if it were the spirit of the whole visible 
world of air, earth and sea: 

" Be thoUy spirit fierce, 
My spirit, — Be thou me, impetuous one! 
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse. 
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth. 
Ashes and sparks, — my words among mankind." 

" My words among mankind. " That is not the voice of 
an ineffectual angel. It is the rallying cry of a great and 
gallant soul on the field of our conflict. When you read 
the *' Ode to the West Wind," see in it the great ele- 
ments of nature grandly presented and the cause of 
mankind in its large passion, and the spirit of Shelley 
like the creative plastic stress itself that 

Sweeps through the didl dense world, compelling there 
All new successions to the form they wear." 

[212] 



SHELLEY 

Such are some of the ways in which Shelley entered into 
the Ufe of men as Wordsworth entered into the life of na- 
ture, and leads the way for those who have hearts to 
follow. Dip in life, as he did, with honesty, with enthusi- 
asm, with faith, and whatever be the starting point at 
last you emerge on those craggy uplands of abstract and 
austere beauty and reason and righteousness and liberty 
and love — 

''Whereto our God himself is sun and moon;** — 

the fountain-heads whence flow all the streams of the 
ordered life of the vale. I have illustrated this process of 
life by the idea of the eye composing a picture; so the 
soul selects its most cherished desires and memories, 
and comes to be the soul of an artist, or a soldier, or an 
engineer, as the case may be. Let me vary the illustra- 
tion, and say that our problem is, in the presence of the 
world before us lying dull and crude and meaningless at 
first, to charge certain things in it with our own thought 
and feeling, and so to give them meaning; thus our fa- 
miliar rooms of the house, and the fields round about it, 
for example, gain a power and meaning which is for us 
only; the stranger does not feel the welcome that the 
trees of the dooryard give to him who was born under 
them. But we find, as our minds go out into life, things 
already charged with emotion and thought, like the flag 

[213] 



THE TORCH 

or the cross ; and when the flag is brought to our Hps and 
the cross to our breast, we feel the stored emotion of the 
nation's Hfe, the stored emotion of Christian sorrow, in 
the very touch of the symbol ; life — the life of the world 
pours into us with power. And we find, again, ideas that 
are similarly already clothed with might — charged with 
the hearts of whole nations that have prayed for them, 
with precious lives that have died for them : 

"Names are there, nature's sacred watchwords" — 

liberty, truth, justice; and, if we possess our souls of 
them, the power of man flows into us as if we held elec- 
tric handles in our palms; beaded on the poet's verse, 
dropt from the lips of some rapt orator, they thrill us — 
and the instancy, the fervour, the inspired power that 
then wakes along our nerves is, we feel, the most au- 
thentic sign that we are immortal spirits. And men 
there are, who seem like nuclei and central ganglions of 
these ideas, whose personality is so charged with their 
power that we idolize and almost worship them — what 
we call hero-worship. Such a man Shelley was, and is, 
to me. I remember as it were yesterday, when I was a 
freshman at Harvard, the very hour in that cold library 
when my hand first closed round the precious volume; 
and to this day the fragrant beauty of that blossomed 

[214] 



SHELLEY 

May is as the birth of a new life; and when I read Words- 
worth's ode, — 

" Not in entire forgetfulness 
And not in utter nakedness. 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come" — 

I think of these first days with Shelley. To others it is 
some other book, some other man — Carlyle, Emer- 
son, Goethe — whoever it may be : for the selective 
principle always operates to bring a man to his own ; but 
in whatever way it comes about, the seeking mind gets 
connected with these men, books, ideas, symbols, 
through which it receives the stored race-force of man- 
kind; so each of us, passing through the forms of de- 
veloping life, receives the revelation of the world and of 
himself, grasps the world and is able to express himself 
through it, to utter his nature, not in language, but in 
being, in idea and emotion, and becomes more and 
more completely man, working toward that consumma- 
tion, which I began by placing before you, of the time 
when the best that has anywhere been in the world shall 
be the portion of every man bom into it. 

I must crave your patience for yet a final thought, 
which, though it may be hard to realize, yet, if it be re- 
alized only at moments, sheds light upon our days. Of 
all the webs of illusion in which our mortality is en- 

[215] 



THE TORCH 

meshed, time is the greatest illusion. This race-store, 
our inheritance, of which I have been speaking, which 
vitalized in our lives is race-power, is not a dead thing, a 
thing of the past; all that it has of life with us is living. 
Plato is not a thing of the past, twenty centuries ago; 
but a mood, a spirit, an approach to supreme beauty, by 
the pathway of human love; Spenser's *' Red Cross 
Knight " is not an Elizabethan legend, but the image of 
the Christian life to-day; and the hopes of man were not 
burnt away in the fire that consumed Shelley's mortal 
remains by the bright Mediterranean waves, nor do they 
sleep with his ashes by the Roman wall; they live in us. I 
have made much of the idea that all history is at last ab- 
sorbed in imagination, and takes the form of the ideal in 
literature ; it is a present ideal. We dip in life, as Shelley 
did, and we put on in our own personality these forms of 
which I have been speaking all along — forms of liberty, 
forms of beauty, forms of reason — of righteousness, of 
kindliness, of love, of courtesy, of charity, of joy in na- 
ture, of approach to God — and these forms being pres- 
sent with us, eternity is with us; they have been shaped 
in past ages by the chosen among men — by poets, by 
saints, by dreamers — by Plato, by Virgil, and Dante, 
by Shakspere and Goethe, who live through them in us ; 
except in so far as they so live in us, they are dust and 
ashes J Babylon is not more a grave. But these ideal 

[216 J 



SHELLEY 
forms of thought and emotion, charged with the Hfe of 
the human spirit through ages, are here and now, a 
part of present Hfe, of our Hves, as our Hves take on these 
forms ; casting their shadows on time, they raise us, as by 
the hands of angels, up the paths of being — we are re- 
leased from the temporal, we lay hold on eternity, and 
entering on our inheritance as heirs of man's past glory, 
we begin to lead that life of the free soul among the things 
of the spirit, which is the climax of man's race-life and 
the culmination of the soul's long progress through 
time. 



THE END 



[217] 



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